


and death i think is no parenthesis

by laiqualaurelote



Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Horror, American Horror Story References, F/M, Gore, Haunted Houses, Horror, M/M, Not Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2019-12-26 20:28:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18289661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laiqualaurelote/pseuds/laiqualaurelote
Summary: “You guys seem really chill about all this,” observed Ben. “By this point most people are running around screaming.”“Occupational hazard,” said Klaus.“I’ve lost a lot of blood,” said Diego. “I’m just accepting everything at face value right now.”Allison is the best damn realtor in the business, and she is going to sell the Hargreeves Mansion if it kills her. Never mind that it’s packed to the rafters with the ghastly relics of grisly murders, or that there’s a vampire in the basement who looks like a 13-year-old, or that the medium she hired to exorcise its inhabitants keeps flirting with some of them, i.e. the one with the knives and the one with the tentacles. Or that if they all spend enough time together, they just might cause the apocalypse.NotSiblings!AU that is basically The Umbrella Academy as American Horror Story: Murder House, though you need not have seen any AHS to read this.





	1. they said their nevers they slept their dream

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for horror, graphic descriptions of gore and a scene that may be considered a suicide.

Vanya awoke from the same dream, the one where she was playing Shostakovich to a full house at Carnegie Hall, to find herself back in the garden.  

 

“Shit,” she breathed, and it turned into mist before her face - it was that cold now, it was well into fall and she did not need to be sleepwalking across town to a creepy old house she had no reason to be drawn to. At least her somnolent self had thought to put on her Converses instead of going barefoot like the last time. It was a wonder she hadn’t got tetanus by now.

 

She surveyed the house, which rose, silent as ever, around her. Once it would have been splendid; now it leered, decrepit, like a drunk. The garden, once beautiful, was overgrown; Vanya, unshod, had cut her feet on some of the vines that snaked across the ground and ran up the walls.

 

Vanya did not know how she kept getting into the house - surely whoever owned this place kept it locked? - but she did, and now she had to get out. This meant going back through the entrance hall, with its imposing staircase that led up into darkness.

 

Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something move in a window.

 

Vanya ran. Feet skidding on polished marble, she dashed through the hall. Was that a figure leaning over the balustrade? No time to think. There was a heartstopping moment when she thought the front door was locked, but it was merely stuck; a desperate push, and she was through onto the street.  

 

A clock tower in the distance told her it was 3am. No cabs to be had; even if there were, she hadn’t brought out cash to pay them. “Shit,” said Vanya again with feeling, and began to walk the long way home.

 

*

 

The chief problem with being dead - after you got over the initial trauma - was that it was really boring.

 

Ten years into his strange afterlife in the house, Ben had run through all the things he could do and then some. He went on runs through its many galleries and up and down the staircases - although he could not, technically speaking, get out of breath. He stood at the windows and watched people go by on the street for hours. He kept out of the way of the other ghosts, who were by and large not pleasant company. There were some exceptions, like Grace, who was quite lovely even though she was clearly stuck in a loop and conversations with her never went anywhere, but the rest were best avoided. The other ghosts left Ben alone. He was the most powerful in the house, even if he didn’t like how he had got that way.

 

“Ten years?” scoffed Five. “Ten years is nothing, my friend.  Immortality’s a bitch.”

 

Five was not a ghost, though nor was he alive. He was very brilliant and possibly insane. This was no surprise to Ben, since Five had been stuck in the body of a 13-year-old for 45 years, and that would give anyone issues. He had not mentioned this thought to Five, who was the only person he even liked talking to any more, even if Five quoted David Foster Wallace unironically and drank other people’s blood to stay alive. To be fair, he had stopped doing the latter on the premises after Ben complained. Also, he brought Ben new books, even though Ben took forever to read them on account of how he had trouble turning the pages, because he was dead.

 

“In any case,” Five went on, “they’re going to try to sell this place again, so we’d better brace ourselves for some excitement.”

 

“Shit,” said Ben. “Really? After what happened last time? You’d think they’d have learnt by now.”

 

Five shrugged. “Realtors never learn and don’t care enough to. You stay here and figure out a game plan, I’m going out.”

 

“Not like I have a - ” Five vanished before Ben could finish his sentence, as he was wont to do “ - choice.”  

 

Left alone, Ben wandered the house. He played absent-minded hopscotch in the squares of moonlight the windowframes made on the floors. He saw the woman whom he thought of as the Violinist in the garden again, staring at nothing, and then coming to herself with a start and running away. Ben and Five had once discussed confronting the Violinist, but decided this was something best avoided.

 

“Do you think she knows what she’s doing?” Ben had wondered.

 

“No,” Five had replied after some time. “I don’t. And I don’t want to be the one to tell her either. That can be somebody else’s fucking problem.”

 

Ben was drifting in and out of the house’s many bedrooms when he heard something fall over in the one at the end of the corridor. Since there was nothing else to do, he went to check it out and that was how he found the man lying on the floor.

 

The man was covered in blood and unconscious, so that Ben thought at first he must be dead too. He was wearing a mildly ridiculous leather get-up and a domino mask, which meant he was either a vigilante or a very specialised stripper. It was likely to be the former, since he appeared to have suffered a number of knife wounds, though none very deep. Ben was briefly grateful that Five had already left for the night and would not be tempted by this new person in his bloodied state.

 

As Ben loomed over him, the vigilante came to with a muffled curse and flung a knife at Ben. It went through him and hit the wardrobe. “Geez,” said Ben. “Really? What if I’d been alive?”

 

The vigilante stared at him.  “What?”

 

“You shouldn’t be here,” Ben told him. “It’s not safe. Go to a hospital. Call an Uber or something. Though I’d advise you to use the postcode of the newsagent’s on the corner, most cars refuse to come to this address any more.”

 

“No hospitals,” said the vigilante hoarsely. How typical. “I thought this house wasn’t occupied.”

 

“This house is haunted.” Surely everyone knew that by now, thought Ben, and resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

 

The vigilante stared at him. “So - you’re - you’re a - ”

 

“Dead, yes.”

 

“Wow,” said the vigilante. “My condolences.”

 

“Thanks,” said Ben awkwardly. Nobody had said that to him in a while. “How’d you get those?”

 

The vigilante looked dismissively down at his stab wounds. “Gang fight. I’m a vigilante, you know.”

 

“No way,” said Ben, dry as Arizona. “I would never have guessed in a million years. And you’re here to lie low because you didn’t plan a safehouse beforehand and now you’re on the hitlist of every mafia goon citywide. Am I right?”

 

“Pretty much. You get a lot of vigilantes round here?”

 

“You’re my first. But I read a lot of comic books and as vigilantes go, you seem rather shit at it.”

 

“Whatever,” said the vigilante, letting his head thunk back on the floorboards. “Can I stay or not?”

 

“The house will kill you slowly,” said Ben. “If you don’t bleed out first.”

 

“That’s not gonna happen. I heal really quickly. And you’ll help me stay safe. Yeah?”

 

“How do you know I will do any such thing?” said Ben loftily. “I could be evil, for all you know. I could be waiting for you to pass out again so I can devour your soul.”

 

“Nah,” said the vigilante. “I think you like me.” And then, with supreme confidence, he passed out again, leaving Ben so annoyed that he considered sucking out his soul to prove a point. He did not. He hated that it made the guy right.

 

*

 

Allison Jones was going to sell the Hargreeves mansion.  She was the best damn realtor in the business. She could sell anything. She could sell a penthouse to an acrophobe and a sandcastle in a desert. It was some kind of gift: she told people they wanted something, and then they did. Nobody had sold the Hargreeves mansion for ten years now, but she was going to do it if it killed her.

 

Granted, it was proving harder than she had expected. She’d almost had it in the bag this morning with the Tylers - young, new money, needing a townhouse with more rooms than they could ever think up uses for - except on their tour of the kitchen, they’d stumbled across a woman in a 1950s-style swing dress. While Allison had tried to politely find out in conversation a) who she was and b) what the fuck she thought she was doing on this property, she’d turned around to search the cupboards and they’d all seen the back of her skull, smashed in with bits of her brain visible.

 

So that was a problem.

 

Haunted or not, Allison was going to sell this damn house, because right now she needed a win, something to take her mind off the custody battle and the thought of never getting to see Claire again, needed to prove that she was capable and cool-headed and a woman who _had all her shit together_ , damn it - plus it was a crying shame to have that much acreage smack dab in the middle of town untouched, all those soaring ceilings and carpeted galleries and Moroccan zellij screens, it came fully furnished, for fuck’s sake - which was why she was here, hammering on Klaus’s door when she’d told herself she’d never stoop to this again.

 

Klaus opened after the thirtieth or so knock. He was wearing a blue felt bolero over a kilt. “Heavens, you’re persistent today.”

 

“Hear me out,” began Allison, hefting a bottle of whisky out of her Mary Poppins-sized purse.

 

Klaus snatched it. “You come bearing gifts. It must be bad.” He squinted at the label. “Ooh, Lagavulin. My, my. This is going to be some iniquity on the level of The Shining.”

 

“It’s the Hargreeves mansion.”

 

Klaus whistled. “I’m not going near _that_. I can feel it all the way from over town.”

 

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Allison cajoled him. “I’ll double your fee from last time.”

 

“Last time it was poltergeists!” shouted Klaus. “Head-spinning, acid-spitting poltergeists! And that was just one teensy duplex. How do you think I’m going to cope with a mansion’s worth?”

 

“You weren’t at your full strength then. You weren’t clean. I heard a rumour that you are now. I heard a rumour you want back in the game.”

 

Her words, she was pleased to see, were having some kind of effect. “Fine,” said Klaus, “but I want a cut too, from your commission.”

 

“Five per cent.”

 

“Thirty.”

 

“Are you trying to bankrupt me?” Allison feigned outrage. “I have a young child, sir!”

 

“Whom you might not have on your hands for much longer,” retorted Klaus. And, as Allison blanched, “You’re not the only one who hears rumours around here, darling. Twenty per cent.”

 

“Ten. Or I’ll take my business to Bertrand.”

 

“Bertrand is a charlatan and you know it. Twenty for the real deal.”

 

“Fifteen, and that’s including your consultation fee, you bastard. I’m going no lower.”

 

“Done.” Klaus held his hand out solemnly. When she reached out to shake, he pulled her in and kissed her on both cheeks instead. “Did you contour? It looks divine.”

 

“I’ve got naturally defined cheekbones.”

 

“Of course you do, you witch.” Klaus winked.  

 

Allison sighed. “Tomorrow morning at the house, 10am.”

 

Obviously Klaus didn’t show up until well past noon. Allison killed the time rearranging her For Sale banner on the house facade.

 

“I can’t believe someone’s going to try to buy this place.”

 

Allison turned. The speaker was a man with a buzz cut and a uniform, pulling a wheelie bag in one hand; in the other, he had a coffee. Allison cocked a hip and flashed him her best grin. “You better believe it, because I’m going to see it sold.”

 

The guy chuckled to himself. “I’ve lived next door for most of my life and I can tell you that’s never worked out for anyone. You must be Ms Jones,” he added, gesturing at Allison’s beaming face on the banner and transferring the coffee to his other hand so he could offer it to her. “I’m Luther.”

 

Allison shook his hand. “What do you mean, it’s never worked out for anyone?”

 

“Come on. You must at least know about the ritual murders. The Cthulhu crazies.”

 

Allison shrugged. “That was ten years ago. People’ll have forgotten.”

 

“People forget,” said Luther. “The house doesn’t.”

 

“O-kay,” said Allison. “So, what do you do for a living, murder conversations?”

 

“Ha,” said Luther. “I’m a pilot. Fresh off a transcontinental flight, as it happens.”

 

“Oh I’m sorry, you must be exhausted. I’m keeping you.”

 

“No, not at all. I’m going to try staying up for a few more hours, beat the jet lag.” Luther looked suddenly self-conscious. “Um, if you haven’t got any appointments at the moment, you’re, um, welcome to come up and sit for a bit.”

 

Allison laughed. “Is that your strategy? Freak me out about the house next door, all the better to lure me into yours?”

 

“ _No_ ,” said Luther, and he was actually horrified, so much so that Allison felt bad for laughing. “I just. I didn’t want to leave you stuck on the doorstep by yourself. And now that sounds like pity, I didn’t mean - ugh, sorry - ”

 

Clearly it was not true what they said about pilots being smooth talkers. “It’s sweet of you. But I’m waiting for someone.”

 

Whereupon Klaus stepped off the bus on cue. “Yoohoo!”

 

“You’re more than two hours late,” said Allison severely.

 

“The bus was late.” Klaus flapped a hand dismissively. “Anyway, sure you didn’t want me interrupting whatever this is?” He waved suggestively at the space between the two of them.

 

“Let’s just get this over with,” snapped Allison, fishing for the keys.

 

Klaus took two steps over the threshold and swayed. “ _Fuck_.”

 

Allison blinked. “Are you okay?”

 

Klaus turned back to her and said, with a gentleness she had never seen from him before, “Allison, sweetheart, I think it might be best if I do this first reconnaissance alone.”

 

“Oh. Are you sure?”

 

“Yes. You’ll be too distracting.” Klaus raised a hand to her melodramatically. “If I’m not back in an hour, call - oh wait. There’s no one to call. Never mind that.” He drifted further into the gloom of the house.

 

“Klaus?” she called after him. “Klaus?”

 

There was no answer.  

 

Allison weighed her options. Plunge into the creepy house after Klaus when he’d specifically told her not to. Sit on the steps waiting for him to be done with his Exorcist gig. Or -

 

She looked across to where Luther was trying to juggle his coffee with searching for his keys. “Hey, flyboy. Is that offer still on?”

 

*

 

The mansion was huge. Allison had given Klaus a layout, but a turn around the stairs and he was already lost. The air was thick with malevolent presence, like Beijing smog. This was going to take _days_.

 

Klaus headed in what he thought was the direction of the kitchen, since that was where Allison had seen the Stepford Wife ghost. It was empty, however. Klaus poked about in some of the other basement rooms. In one, he found what appeared to be a very large steamer trunk. It opened to reveal a pale boy who looked asleep, but when Klaus put his finger under his nose, there was no breath. Hm. Klaus made a mental note to follow up on this room later and replaced the lid of the trunk.

 

He found a back stairwell, went up a couple of floors and wound up in a lavishly-appointed study. He was examining some of the maps in one of the display cases when he heard the chair at the great desk swing slowly around to face him.

 

“Number Four!” barked the man in the chair.

 

He was old, and peering at Klaus furiously through a monocle. “It is you, isn’t it, Number Four? What’s this disgrace of an outfit you’re wearing?”

 

“Excuse _you_.” Klaus plucked at his palazzo pants, miffed. “I’ll have you know this is vintage.”

 

“Well, you’ve turned out to be a disappointment too, haven’t you,” the man went on as if he hadn’t heard a word from Klaus, “tarted up like a mollycot and using your powers for petty parlour tricks. Why, you’ve barely scraped the surface, and yet you’re still up here wasting space.”

 

“Go away,” snarled Klaus. “Go away, you old coot.”

 

But the ghost was tenacious, and followed Klaus out of the study and down a gallery adorned with paintings, still shouting. Klaus, fingers in his ears, caught phrases like “reprobate!” and “wastrel!” Eventually Klaus spun round, shouting “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” and pushed him. To his surprise, he sent the old man crashing through a bannister and down one storey into the living room.

 

“Oh,” breathed Klaus in the sudden silence, “oh.”

 

He looked down into the living room. The carpet was covered in chunks of wood and splinters, but there was no sign of the old man. Klaus tiptoed downstairs and walked into a whole different version of the room altogether.

 

This room was dark, except for the fire roaring in the grate and the torches flickering around it. Klaus, rubbing his eyes desperately, saw the torches were being held by hooded figures standing in a ring around the long table in the centre of the room. As he stumbled closer to the table, he realised to his horror that the writhing shape on it was a young man, tied down and gagged, and that one of the hooded figures was standing over him with a dagger raised.

 

“Oh shit,” whispered Klaus. He knew what this was and did not want to see it. He tried to go back to the other room, the sunlit room of the present, but the house’s grip was sticky and he could not pry it loose.

 

The hooded figures raised their torches, chanting in a horrible tongue. As Klaus watched, helpless, the figure with the dagger - the head priest of this crazy cult - made two long slices down either of the man’s arms as he screamed against the gag. Acolytes bent to collect the blood in bowls. The head priest dipped his finger into a bowl and began to write runes on the man’s chest in his blood. The chanting rose and rose again.

 

Something was rippling under the man’s skin. Awful shapes shifted and twisted against his guts. The head priest dropped the dagger and raised his hands in ecstasy as his congregation fell to their knees. “Bring forth the great ones! Bring forth the eaters of the world!”

 

A glowing, dark tentacle emerged from the man’s abdomen, followed by another. Something vast and unspeakable was crawling out of his flesh, even as he writhed and tried to get away from his own body. The torches quivered as the congregation shook and ululated their thanks.

 

Then the head priest cried out, aghast. Their victim had managed to get hold of the dagger and cut through one of the bonds holding him to the table. Now, he plunged the blade into his own belly, hacked and stabbed at the roiling mass of tentacles even as the acolytes tried to wrestle the weapon away from him. Blood spattered across the table. “No,” gasped Klaus, “no, no.” He turned away from it all, ran towards what he hoped was the door, collided with something and fell.

 

The dark room was gone, and the figures and flickering firelight with it. Sunlight streaming through the great louvred windows set dust motes dancing above the carpet. Klaus looked up and saw he had run into somebody who had just entered the room. It was the man he had just seen dying on a table.

 

“Hi,” said the ghost. He looked confused.

 

Klaus had time to think one inappropriate thought - _oh shit, he’s cute_ \- before he passed out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This began because I wanted to write something from Ben's point of view about being dead and bored, except then it spiralled out of control into an American Horror Story-esque haunted house with Plot.
> 
> In this AU, Sir Reginald died before he could adopt seven superpowered children because of a prophecy (though he really did intend to). Everyone does have their canon powers to some extent, although in some cases they are not aware of it (e.g. if Allison Rumours anyone, she does so through an accidental turn of phrase).
> 
> The title and chapter headings are from e e cummings poems.


	2. let’s live like the light that kills

Luther had been awake for nearly 50 hours now. Not the longest he’d ever gone without sleep, but he was definitely flagging. Unfortunately, the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on had shut herself in his bedroom, where she had been sobbing for the past 15 minutes.

 

Luther was not good at these situations. He was in them a lot less than people assumed. His last girlfriend, Stacey - in deference to cliche, she had indeed been an air stewardess - had told him he was too serious. “No offence, babe, but I need to be with someone who knows how to have a good time.” This had been five years ago. They still got rostered on the same flight sometimes and it was awkward all round.

 

He reviewed the sequence of events. They had come upstairs, he had made them more coffee despite having already drunk two cups, Allison had been in the middle of a funny story about showing a penthouse where the seller had a “vomitous demon cat” when she had got up to take a call and asked if she could use his bedroom. There had been the sound of a furious argument. Then the sobbing.

 

Luther tentatively knocked on the door.  “Allison? You okay in there?”

 

“I’m sorry,” he heard Allison say after a beat. “Give me a second.”

 

Luther gave her ten before the door opened. Allison, it seemed, cried like a film star, in that she got the waterworks going without any of that ugly face-scrunching that real people did when they cried.

 

“That was my ex-husband,” she said quietly. “He has full custody of our daughter and he...he’s cancelling my visit this weekend.”

 

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

 

Allison gave a high-pitched laugh which cracked halfway into a sob. “Look at me. A guy invites me up for coffee and I break down in his bedroom. I’m a mess.”

 

“I’ve seen worse,” said Luther, which was true, because he did live next to That House.

 

“Oh, shit.” Allison clapped her hands to her mouth. “Klaus. I forgot. What time is it?”

 

Klaus did not answer any of her phone calls. “I should go over and check on him,” said Allison, grabbing her stuff. “I mean, he’s probably fine, he’s really bad with answering his phone, but just in case.”

 

“I’ll come with you.”

 

“No, no, you’ve done so much already - ”

 

“It’s not like I have plans.” Luther almost never had plans. “Besides, you could use someone who’s known the house since they were little.”

 

This was not strictly true. Luther had not been in the house since he was eight, and now that he was standing in the cool darkness of the entrance hall, he remembered why. The memory of that scene came back to him in fragments: the laboratory, the metal gurney, the small figure on it. He had thought it was a child, but then it turned its face towards him in mute anguish and he saw it was an ape. It had been segmented, legs and arms severed from its torso. The old man standing over it with a scalpel. “Number One,” he had said, without turning around.  “Like what you see?”

 

“Klaus?” called Allison in the present. “Are you here? Klaus?”

 

Luther saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and on instinct shoved Allison out of the way. As the iron chandelier came hurtling down at them, he braced himself and caught it.

 

Dust enveloped them both. Tossing the chandelier aside, Luther looked up at the floors above. There was a figure standing up on the third floor, too far above to see his features clearly, but Luther thought he caught a sneer before the figure stepped away from the bannister.  

 

Luther inspected the chandelier. It was one of a set suspended above the hall. Someone had loosed its chain.

 

Allison was staring at him open-mouthed. “How’d you do that?”

 

On the ground, the chandelier came up to her waist. “You just caught it,” she went on.  “Like it was nothing.”

 

“Um,” said Luther. “I work out.”

 

Allison raised an eyebrow. “Clearly.”

 

There was the skidding of feet on marble and Klaus came galloping down the stairs, flapping frantically at them. “I told you to wait outside!”

 

“Someone dropped a chandelier on us!” Allison yelled back at him.

 

“See? See? Nobody listens to me. Now we’re in the freaking Phantom of the Opera.” Klaus paused at the foot of the stairs to catch his breath and seemed only then to notice Luther. “You’re still around.”

 

“He saved me from the chandelier,” said Allison. “For which I’m very grateful,” she added to Luther.

 

“Out,” said Klaus. “Out of the house, now.” He shooed them out. “I don’t know if I’m up to this,” he went on, closing the door behind him. “It’s so much worse than I thought.”

 

“How bad?” demanded Allison.

 

“The house is knee-deep in them,” said Klaus. “It’s not just your housewife ghost, Allison. I got stuck in a flashback to the ritual murders, it was horrible. And there was an old man with a monocle - ”

 

“Oh, that guy,” said Luther.

 

“You’ve met him too?” Klaus shuddered. “What a prick, am I right? But it’s not just them, I think there’s something about the house itself. I’ve heard of places like this. You can’t sell it, Allison. It should be left alone.”

 

“That’s not what I’m paying you to say, Klaus.”

 

“But - ”

 

“Do you want more money? Is that it? I’ll up your cut, how about that? Twenty-five per cent.” Allison gripped Klaus by the shoulders. “I need this, Klaus, all right? I need this deal.”

 

Klaus wet his lips with his tongue. “I don’t like it.”

 

“Please, Klaus.”

 

“Fine, fine.” Klaus threw his hands up, shrugging her off. “I can’t get rid of them, but I can see if there’s some way to...keep them quiet for a bit, so you can get it sold. Though what happens after that - I hope you can live with that on your conscience.”

 

Allison said nothing.

 

“I’m going to need a few days,” said Klaus. “Maybe a week, I don’t know. No showings until then, all right? _No showings_. Oh, and give me those keys.” He stormed back into the house and let the door slam shut on them. They heard the lock slide home.

 

“He’s right,” Luther heard himself say. “About what happens after that.”

 

“I wish you hadn’t heard that.”

 

“But it - ”

 

“It’s not my problem,” she said. “I know it makes me a terrible person. I just want to do my job well, that’s all.”

 

They stared at each other in silence on the sidewalk.

 

“Well, thanks for the coffee,” said Allison after some time. “I’m sorry I’m not the person you thought I was.” She turned on her heel and began walking away.

 

Luther felt like he should say something, but couldn’t think of what. He settled instead for doing what he should have done hours ago, and went back to bed.

 

*

 

Diego was not turning out to be as good a vigilante as he had hoped. Granted, it was not exactly like being a vigilante came with an instruction manual. There were all sorts of minor details he was still ironing out, like the issue of his name. He had thought The Kraken sounded pretty badass, as vigilante names went. However, every time he introduced himself as such, people just said: “Oh, you don’t look like it” or “You mean like in Pirates Of The Caribbean?” and this would frustrate Diego so much that he would just end up stabbing them all.

 

Clearly he should have spent less time on the name and more time on establishing safehouses that weren’t the gym he slept in the boiler room of. If the Russian mafia rolled up to the gym right now and asked for Diego, Al would just tell them to head on back and say hello.  

 

All these poor decisions had led to where Diego was now, which was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood in a mansion he had arbitrarily picked by keying “abandoned house” into the Google Maps search bar, which had turned out to be haunted.

 

The blood had dried, which meant he had been here some time. Diego sat up, wincing, and realised it was day. He was in a bedroom that could, a long time ago, have been a child’s.  

 

There was someone lying in the bed. He looked like he had gotten dressed in a thrift store sale with his eyes shut and he had the words Hello and Goodbye tattooed on his hands.

 

Diego limped over and shoved him, hard. Not a ghost, then.  

 

“Urgh,” said the person, batting feebly at Diego, “go away, you damn dancing elves.” Then he bolted upright, shrieking.

 

Diego tried to hush him, on the off-chance the Russian mafia were paying attention, which wound up with them tussling on the bed while Diego tried to cover the other guy’s mouth with his palm and got bitten for his trouble.

 

“I’m backing off, I’m backing off!” hissed Diego, “just _stop screaming_.”

 

He raised his hands and sat up slowly. The other guy stared up at him wide-eyed. “Oh.  You’re a live one.” He extended a languid hand. “Klaus.”

 

Diego considered and rejected introducing himself as The Kraken. He did not want to find out what mockery this one would make of it. “Diego.”

 

“Enchanted, I’m sure,” said Klaus blithely, as if he were not clasping the teethmarks he had left in Diego’s palm. “What brings you to this hellhole?”

 

“I’m a vigilante,” said Diego, which explained nothing but usually distracted people long enough to forget their question. “Were you too kidnapped by a ghost?”

 

“Good-looking, Asian, leather jacket?”

 

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

 

“I did not kidnap you,” said the ghost from the door, “you broke into _my_ house. Also, you think I’m good-looking?”

 

Diego and Klaus turned to stare at him. “Yes,” said Klaus. He pushed Diego off him casually and sat up. “Don’t you?”

 

“I haven’t seen myself in ten years.” The ghost came into the room and leaned on the dresser, watching them. “I don’t remember what I look like.”

 

He stretched out a hand and booped Klaus on the nose. “Oi,” said Klaus.  

 

“I wasn’t imagining it,” said the ghost. He seemed utterly fascinated. “I can touch you. And - ” He reached out tentatively to poke Diego in the shoulder. Diego caught his wrist on reflex. The ghost stared at his hand, delighted. “I can touch other things. Other people!”

 

“You can’t normally?” said Diego.

 

“No, I’m incorporeal,” said the ghost, as if it was obvious. “I can move things if I really try, but it’s a lot of effort. It takes me like five minutes to lift the page of a book. God, I miss reading.”

 

“I - ” Klaus was staring at his hands in awe. “You carried me. All the way from the living room.”

 

“I couldn’t leave you there, could I? That’s one of the bad zones.”

  
  
Klaus pointed at him. “I know you. You’re Benjamin Chang. The ritual murders a decade ago, that was you.”

 

“You can just call me Ben,” said the ghost. He looked uncomfortable. “You saw it, didn’t you.”

 

“I wish I hadn’t,” said Klaus fervently.

 

“They were going to come through,” Ben said, tonelessly. “They were going to eat the world. I heard them say so. So I closed the gate before They could get through fully. It was the only way.”

 

“Wait,” said Diego, “when you say ritual murders, in the plural - ”

 

“Everyone died,” said Klaus. “The whole cult. Twenty-six people. Whatever was at hand - poker, letter opener, paperweight. They killed themselves in that room.”

 

“I came back,” said Ben. “And They came with me. Because I was dead, They could only manifest in spirit, but still - They showed themselves and it was enough.” He paused. “I didn’t mean to. All I could think of was how I had had to take my own life because of what they did. And then they started taking their own.”

 

“That’s…” Diego didn’t think he’d lose any sleep over that one. He felt this was an adequate response if somebody tried to make you a human sacrifice.

 

“You guys seem really chill about all this,” added Ben. “By this point most people are running around screaming.”

 

“Occupational hazard,” said Klaus.

 

“I’ve lost a lot of blood,” said Diego. “I’m just accepting everything at face value right now.”

 

There were shouts coming from downstairs. “Klaus? Are you here? Klaus?”

 

“Oh shit,” said Klaus. “It’s Allison.”

 

“Who’s that?” asked Ben.

 

“The person who hired me to exorcise you.”  

 

There was an almighty crash. Klaus leapt out of bed and pelted out through the door, crying: “Allison!”

 

“I don’t know what’s more disturbing,” said Ben in the silence that followed, “that he thinks we can be exorcised, or what caused that crash. What are you doing?”

 

Diego retrieved the knife he had thrown through Ben yesterday from where it had lodged in the wardrobe. “I’m leaving.” It was still light out; if he hurried, he could make it down to the docks by dark and catch the Russians’ next shipment -

 

“I thought you wanted to stay,” said Ben.

 

Diego looked over at him. Ben was considering the floorboards with an air of studied nonchalance.  

 

“Hey,” said Diego, more gently than he’d intended. “I’ll be back, all right? You said yourself, I need a safehouse.”

 

Ben laughed bitterly. “This is the least safe house you’ll ever find.”

 

“Even so,” said Diego. “Is there a back door I can use? I don’t want to run into whatever’s going on out front.”

 

“This way." Ben pushed himself off the dresser and walked through Diego. In Klaus’s absence he was incorporeal once more; it felt like a cold blast of air.  

 

Diego followed him down a spiral staircase and into a wide, walled garden. The grass had got long and brushed their ankles as they walked.  

 

“How old is this house?” he asked.

 

“More a century. It was built by Sir Reginald Hargreeves - you know, the 19th-century inventor.”

 

“Is he here too?”

 

“Oh, yeah. He used to follow me around shouting random stuff. Quotes from Joseph Conrad, for some reason.”

 

“Who?” Diego had never bothered with literature class.

 

“You know, Heart Of Darkness,” said Ben. “‘The horror, the horror!’ Ah, never mind.”

 

Diego stopped. Something was moving in the long grass. “Ben. What’s that?”

 

It was a man. Or rather, half of a man - his legs had been hacked off above the knee. He was crawling towards them on his elbows, moaning, “Please, stop, please, I’m sorry, no more - ”

 

Diego stared at him, aghast. “Is he - ”

 

“Oh, that.” Ben strode past the spectre grimly. “I should have warned you. The garden’s full of them. They’re in other parts of the house too, but mostly the garden.”

 

There was a clear, high sound, and the man pitched forward as his left forearm detached at the elbow and rolled away into the grass. When he raised his face, it was a mess of blood and snot. “Please…”

 

“Come on.” Ben was standing by a small wooden door cut into the garden wall. He was holding out his hand to Diego, for all that Diego could not take it. “He’s gone. You can’t help him.”

 

“I want to help everyone,” said Diego, unable to take his eyes off the man as something tore him apart, slowly and neatly, like a child pulling the legs off a fly.

 

“I know, Diego,” said Ben sadly. “I know.”

 

*

 

Five had gone more than four decades without a moral compass. It had suited him fine. Such things were at best a hindrance when you drank blood for sustenance. Unfortunately, he had then befriended Ben, who objected very vocally to Five just draining any old human at hand, and furthermore had banned him from doing so on the grounds. Five had to allow that there was some logic to this: they could not afford to draw any more attention to the house and the goings-on therein, and so one had to be selective about who one offed.

 

This was hugely troublesome at times when Five was starving, like now, but the truth was that he enjoyed Ben’s company. Ben was a source of quality conversation, which was more than could be said for most bipeds whose acquaintance Five had bothered to make. Granted, he had his idiosyncrasies, like this whole business of ethical eating, plus the period early on in their friendship when he had pestered Five endlessly for updates on Harry Potter, having died before the sixth book came out. Five thought Harry Potter puerile and had refused to indulge him, but Ben had so annoyed Five about it that he had shouted, “ _Dumbledore dies_!” Ben had refused to speak to him for a week.

 

Five should have known better than to develop an attachment to a housemate, even one who was trapped in said house for eternity. But he had, and so here he was, practising so-called ethical consumption at great cost to his immediate wellbeing. He had thought it was a good night at first, when he had stumbled across the mugging in the alley. Unfortunately, he had not been thorough. Having chased the screaming victim away and settled in to drain one of the thugs he had laid low, he had been set upon by the other, who was not as insensate as he had assumed and had hauled him back by the hair and cut his throat. Now Five was staggering about the alley spewing blood from some artery - which he had only just put in himself, for crying out loud, the _waste_ \- while his would-be entree made a run for it.  

 

There was a stifled scream. An unfortunate passerby, a young woman, had chanced upon the scene and dropped all her grocery bags in shock. The thug was advancing on her with his blade out, clearly intent on leaving no witnesses, when Five jumped him from behind, latched onto his neck and started drinking.

 

The man sank to his knees, his attempts to throw Five off growing weaker as Five drank and drank, until the taste of the blood was cooling and curdling and the man’s head was lolling on his chest. Five dropped him, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and checked that the wound in his throat had zippered itself shut. Then he realised that the woman was still standing there, frozen. Great. Now he would have to kill her too. Perhaps Ben wouldn’t notice this once.

 

Then he got a good look at her face and recognised her. “Oh, it’s you.”

 

“What?” said the Violinist, non-plussed. “Have we met?”

 

In his years of solitude, Five had developed the habit of talking to himself. Sometimes now he thought thoughts and only realised later he had said them out loud. He kicked himself mentally. “Not really.”

 

And then, when she kept staring at him, “The Hargreeves house. You know, the one where you go all the time. I live there.”

 

“Oh.” The Violinist processed this. “Can we talk?”

 

“Yes, fine. Not here, though.”

 

“Yeah, yeah,” said the Violinist distractedly. She produced a packet of wet wipes from her purse and handed them to Five. While he cleaned himself up, she began gathering up her fallen grocery bags. Five, because he was a gentleman, gave her a hand.

 

They wound up in Griddy’s Doughnuts. “Black coffee for him,” the Violinist, who had introduced herself as Vanya, told the waitress. “Decaf for me, thanks.”

 

“School’s out late these days, huh,” remarked the waitress.

 

“Extra-curriculars,” said Five, beaming. He looked manic when he did that, Ben had informed him. “I’m in the end-of-term play. Rehearsals are hardcore.”

 

“Looks exciting.” The waitress eyed his shirt, which was still bloody.

 

“You bet it is. I’m Titus Andronicus.”  

 

The waitress stared. “It’s Shakespeare,” Five supplied.

 

“Oh, of course,” said the waitress, with little recognition. To Vanya: “You must be so proud.”

 

“I…”  Vanya glanced sideways at Five, still wearing his too-toothy grin “...yes?”

 

The waitress looked between the two of them, clearly doing some mental arithmetic. “You had him pretty early on?”

 

Vanya gaped at her. “She was just a child herself, really,” Five chipped in. “But she chose to have me. So noble. I owe her everything.”

 

“You really do,” said Vanya, glaring.

 

“Children are such a blessing,” sighed the waitress.

 

“Yes,” said Vanya, straight-faced. “He’s my precious bundle. Of joy.”

 

The waitress finally bustled off to tend to some other customer. “The house,” said Vanya, turning to him quickly. “Tell me about it.”

 

Five took a moment to appreciate the coffee. Nothing like fresh caffeine flooding somebody else’s bloodstream. “What you want to know is why you keep showing up there.”

 

“I...yeah.” Vanya’s face looked pinched and unhappy. She could not have been sleeping well, what with the schedule she was keeping. “I’ve...been sleepwalking. Across town, every other night. I wake up in the house. I’d never been there before in my life. I don’t know what it is about it.”

 

This had been exactly what Five told Ben they should avoid, but clearly there was a can of worms right there and somebody was going to have to open it. “Do you remember what happens before you get to the house?”

 

“No. I’m dreaming. Usually I dream I’m playing a big concert. I’m third chair with the Philharmonic, you see.” Vanya gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. “Anyway, what about you? What’s a kid like you doing, living alone in that big, empty place?”

 

“It’s just somewhere I crash,” said Five. “And I’m not a kid.”

 

“Right, you’re an unnatural bloodsucking fiend.”

 

Five let that one go. “The house isn’t empty. The house is very, very haunted. And it’s powerful. It doesn’t have an effect on me, because of my constitution, but I think it’s actually capable of drawing humans to it, if it wants.”

 

“What does it want with me?” said Vanya, valiantly steering clear of Five excluding himself from the human race. “There’s nothing special about me.”

 

Five was going to regret this. He just knew it.

 

“When you come to the house,” he began, “you’re not alone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: Right after I posted this chapter they announced S2 and Ben as a series regular MY HEART (puts on Tiffany and flail-dances alone in room)


	3. for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

Klaus wandered through the house calling, “Ben! Ben!”

 

Ben did not materialise. Perhaps Klaus should not have mentioned the exorcism. That was never a good opener. In any case, whatever Allison thought, Klaus had never actually exorcised anyone. That was the kind of thing you needed holy water and the fear of God for, both of which were as much anathema to Klaus as to his would-be targets. What Klaus did was to persuade people to leave, sometimes by using logic, sometimes by kicking the non-living daylights out of them, as he had done with the duplex poltergeists. That had been especially messy.

 

A house with so many ghosts underfoot could not be cleared out in this fashion. Ben, so far, was the only rational ghost Klaus had met here and was therefore his best shot at getting through to the rest of them. But Ben was nowhere to be found; nor was the leather-clad vigilante Klaus had spent a not-unpleasant ten seconds pressed up against. Nor, even, was the body of the boy in the steamer trunk he had found earlier.

 

He was wandering along one of the upstairs galleries when he saw, at the end of it, the figure of a man waiting for him. “Ben?”

 

The man stepped forward. It was not Ben, but someone else. As he turned his face towards Klaus, the moonlight caught the ruined side of his face, the wreckage of what had been his left eye.

 

“Lost, are we?” he sneered.

 

“A tad,” said Klaus, squinting at the figure in the gloom. “You wouldn’t by any chance be able to point me to the powder room, would you?”

 

“You shouldn’t have come.”

 

Klaus stopped short. The ghost had a hammer in his hand. Klaus saw the way he shifted his weight, flexing his fingers around the grip of the hammer. Whatever he was, the hammer was very real.

 

“Boo,” spat the ghost, and sprang at him.

 

Klaus shrieked and ran for it, grabbing a vase at hand and chucking it behind him. He heard it crash, but dared not spare a glance back to see if he had hit his pursuer. He slipped on a rug and went down flailing, balling up instinctively with his hands over his face.

 

Above him, he saw the ghost rear back, hammer raised. Then something glowing curled around his wrist and hauled him bodily away.

 

“Don’t touch him.”

 

Ben stepped between him and the other ghost. The glow was emanating from a tendril of...something...coming out of him, emerging from where Klaus had seen him stab himself half a dozen times. The tendril had the other ghost pinned to the floor a good ten feet away from them.

 

The other ghost spat a gob of blood on the floor. There was a tooth in it. “I’m doing us all a favour. He’s with the realtor woman, they want us gone.”

 

“I’d love to be gone,” Ben retorted, “but that’s not happening. Anyone in this house touches him, they answer to me. Are we clear?

 

The tendril lifted, allowing the other ghost get to his feet. He pointed the hammer at Klaus. “You can’t watch him forever.” Then he limped out of sight.

 

Ben turned to Klaus, pulling his jacket tighter around him almost self-consciously. There was no sign of anything coming out of his middle. “You okay?”

 

“What in the flaming blazes was any of that?” exclaimed Klaus.

 

Ben sighed. “That’s Leonard. He’s a nasty piece of work. You should stay clear of him.”

 

“What happened to his eye? Was it you?”

 

“No. Long story.” Ben sat down next to him, his back against the wall. “Are you really going to get rid of us?”

 

“That’s what Allison wants me to do. She’s dead set on selling this place.” It occured to Klaus that that was an unfortunate turn of phrase. “Sorry.”

 

“I don’t know why the living are always making these terrible decisions,” muttered Ben. “It’s just going to get more crowded in here.”

 

“Couldn’t you keep them off? With your - ” Klaus wiggled his fingers “ - tentacular powers, like you did with Cyclops there.”

 

“I can’t call on Them too often. It widens the gateway. Even in ghost form, They can still wreak a lot of havoc.”

 

“Wait,” Klaus sat up. “Leonard. He was carrying a hammer. A real hammer. And it wasn’t because of me, I hadn’t even touched him - ”

 

Ben grimaced. “Leonard’s made some sort of pact with the house. He can do things the rest of us can’t. I think it was him who dropped the chandelier on your friend.”

 

“What kind of pact? Why don’t the rest of you do it?”

 

“Because he was willing to do something I would never do.” Ben seemed to view the subject as closed. Instead, he picked up Klaus’s hand - he had grazed it when he fell - and inspected the cuts, and then simply kept turning the hand over and over in his own as if it were a Rubik’s Cube he couldn’t get the hang of.

 

“Ben,” said Klaus, mouth suddenly dry.

 

Ben’s hand drifted up Klaus’s jacket, fingering each metal button as it went, luxuriating in the different textures. He dragged a knuckle up Klaus’s jawline, shivering a little against the stubble. His eyes were dark pools. At some point, they had moved towards each other such that their noses were barely inches apart.

 

Ben pulled back with a shudder. “No.”

 

“What?” said Klaus, and hated how it came out a whine.

 

“No!” Ben scooted back. “This is just body feelings. I forgot how confusing bodies were.”

 

“Ben - ”

 

“I’m not getting it on with someone just because they’re the first person who’s been able to touch me in ten years.” Ben got up. “Especially when they’re also planning to exorcise me!” He strode off down the corridor.

 

Klaus remained sprawled on the musty carpet, gaping after him.

 

After a beat, Ben poked his head back around the corner.

 

“Are you coming?” he said testily. “Or are you just going to lie there and wait for one of the others to take a crack at you?”

 

Klaus scrambled after him. “Friends, at least?” he said with a deceptive casualness that he was proud of, and stuck out his hand.

 

Ben took it. The skin-on-skin contact made the blush flare in his cheeks, and he dropped it like a hot iron.

 

“Friends,” he said. “At least.”

 

*

 

Some days Diego questioned his decision to devote his life to vigilante work. But there were good days. Like the feeling when one blew up an entire shipment of cocaine. Diego was a little bit proud of himself, not gonna lie.

 

Of course, now the price on his head had probably quadrupled and he was definitely not going to see his room at the gym any time soon. That left lying low at Murder Mansion. Nobody had locked the back door since he slipped out. The garden was free of disembowelled corpses at the moment, but Diego tiptoed across it carefully anyway.

 

There was nothing to eat in the kitchen. The fridge, levered open, released a belch of foul air and things Diego did not want to know the name of crawled out and scuttled away into the corners. On the shelves, mildly mossy, were a half-empty bottle of milk which appeared to be sustaining its own lurid microcosm, an egg carton with no eggs in it and a fossilised piece of ham, stuck to the back wall.

 

Diego was wondering if one could order in to a haunted house - and if the Russian mafia might track him down that way - when he heard somebody humming, and then a lovely woman in wide pink skirts swished in singing Peggy Lee under her breath.

 

“Midnight snack?” She beamed at a flabbergasted Diego. “You’re having trouble sleeping again, aren’t you, dear?”

 

“I - no. I just got back.”

 

“Let me fix you something.” She began bustling around the kitchen, although her hands passed through everything. “Peanut butter and jelly sound all right to you?”

 

“Yeah,” said Diego. “Sure.”

 

“Well, sit down then.”

 

Diego sat down at the table and watched her put together an imaginary sandwich, still humming. When she turned her back to him, he could see the gaping wound in the back of her head. It looked like it had been a blunt instrument. A bat, maybe.

 

“Are you okay?” he asked.

 

She turned around, smiling. “Why, I’m right as rain! But it’s sweet of you to ask.” She deposited the imaginary sandwich in front of Diego. “Eat up.”

 

“I’m sorry if this may sound rude,” said Diego, staring at the empty table, “but who are you?”

 

“I’m your mother, dear,” she said, and reached out to smooth his hair. He felt it like a damp cloth on his brow. He had never had a mother - there had been a series of foster homes, but nobody like this woman with her sunlit smile, who was perhaps something like what he had conjured up to fill the ambiguous space of his early daydreams, before he grew older and knew better than to dream.

 

“Humour her.” It was Ben, coming in through the kitchen door with Klaus behind him. “She’s one of those who still don’t know what’s happened to them.”

 

“There you are!” exclaimed the woman. “How the lot of you are growing. We’ll have to get you new kit before the year’s out.”

 

“Hi, Grace,” said Ben. “Nice night.”

 

“You boys must be famished. I’ll get you something to eat too.” She busied herself at the counter.

 

“What happened to her children?” asked Diego. “Her real children.”

 

“Still alive, probably.” Ben perched on the table. “They weren’t in at the time of the home invasion. They’re probably quite old now.”

 

Klaus went up and tapped Grace on the shoulder. “Do you dance?”

 

“What?” said Grace, laughing, and then, “Oh!” as Klaus took her by the hands and began to waltz her around the kitchen, accompanied by an off-key and giddy rendition of “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady. Diego, watching them spin and giggle and knock into the corners of cupboards, felt a strange peace steal over him.

 

Klaus’s singing trailed off. “I,” began Grace. “I.” Something tearful warred on her face with the fixity of her smile. “I just remembered, I’ve got to - ” She held up a finger as if she’d just had a thought, then extended it. Touched Klaus’s face. Went to Ben and adjusted his collar. Put a hand on Diego’s shoulder. Kissed the crown of his head. “I’ve got to - ” she said again, and then she walked out of the kitchen and disappeared.

 

Diego tried to call after her, but there seemed to be something stuck in his throat.

 

The moment was broken when the door to the garden slammed. A teenage boy had just stormed through it. Now he was pacing through the kitchen shouting: “Ben! Ben!”

 

“Five!” exclaimed Ben. “Where have you been, so much has been happening - ”

 

The boy called Five stopped and stared at Klaus and Diego. “Who the fuck are they?”

 

“Everyone, this is Five, Five’s our vampire,” said Ben. “Five, this is Diego and this is Klaus - ”

 

“I leave you alone for one night and you get pets!” exploded Five. “Human pets!”

 

“They are _not_ \- ”

 

“We have talked about this, Ben,” Five went on. “They’ll just die and then you’ll be upset.”

 

Klaus pointed at him. “Rude.”

 

“Yes, but watch _this_.” Ben reached out and slapped Five.

 

“What,” said Five, hand to his face, “the _fuck_.”

 

“He’s a medium!” explained Ben, waving his hands excitedly. “When he’s around me I can touch things again! I can move things, I can feel things - ”

 

“Feel this?” Five socked him hard in the stomach.  

 

“Okay, timeout.” Diego lifted a kicking Five off the ground.

 

“Wow,” said Ben from the floor in tones of awe. “It _hurts_. Pain is a thing!”

 

“Yes,” Klaus squatted down next to him, “but is it a thing you are into, because if so I have many fascinating propositions - ”

 

Five dematerialised from within Diego’s grip and reappeared at the other end of the kitchen, where he began throwing rusty cooking utensils at them. Diego grabbed a chopping board to fend them off. “We have problems, people!” Five was yelling. “We need to _focus_!”

 

“I don’t know!” Diego shouted back. “The flying cutlery is pretty distracting, short stuff!”

 

“Five, settle down!” Ben called out. “Act your age!”

 

“I spoke to the Violinist,” said Five.

 

Ben sat up. “Oh. Oh no. You didn’t - ”

 

“I had to,” said Five. “She asked.”

 

“Did she...take it well?”

 

“She stormed off,” said Five. “I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like it.”

 

“ _Who’s the Violinist_?” Diego mouthed at Klaus.

 

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” Klaus stage-whispered back. “I can’t read lips.”

 

“I guess we’ve got to be prepared for her coming round more often,” Five was saying. “And I really do mean _prepared_.”

 

“Where was all this excitement ten years ago?” lamented Ben. “I could have used it back then. Now it’s an overload and I’m not really appreciating it like I should.”

 

Five checked his watch, a pocket watch that he kept looped in the front of his old-fashioned blazer. “It’s nearly dawn. I’m retiring.” He stalked out of the kitchen, throwing over his shoulder, “Your humans better not make a mess, Ben.”

 

“Okay,” said Diego, stretching and cracking his knuckles, “I need a shower. Is there a working shower in this place?” Though since all his gear was back at the gym, he had nothing to change into. He would cross that bridge when he came to it, he decided.

 

“Oh wow, I guess we have squatters now.” Ben threw his hands up in faux exasperation.

 

“I should really tell Allison about you,” mused Klaus, chin in his hands.

 

“Yeah,” said Diego, and winked at him. “But somehow I have a feeling you won’t.”

 

*

 

“You want to see the Hargreeves mansion,” said Allison in disbelief.

 

“Yes,” said the couple who had walked into her office, in perfect unison.

 

“Shall we maybe fix a time next week? There are currently some…” Allison paused. “Structural difficulties. That we are resolving. With expedience.”

 

“We’d like to see the house now,” said the woman with the severe bob.

 

“What my lady wife means,” said the large man, “is that we are anxious to settle down. She has set her heart on that house.”

 

“Newlyweds, huh?”

 

“Yes,” said the woman unsmilingly. “We are very much in love and we would like a house to fill with it. We heard there’s a lot of room to fill at the Hargreeves mansion.”

 

Allison looked them over. They were both wearing power suits. They did not look like newlyweds, more like secret agents. Well, maybe this was couple dressing where they came from.

 

“Perhaps I can squeeze in a showing in a couple of hours,” she ventured. “I just need to give my associate a heads-up, give him some time to...tidy up.”

 

“We’ll wait,” said the man. They went on staring at her.

 

Her set of keys to the house were in the safe under her desk. Allison suddenly did not feel at all like opening her safe in front of this couple.

 

“How about I meet you at the address in two hours’ time?” she offered, plastering on a smile. “Do you drive? Will you need directions?”

 

“We’ll be fine,” said the woman.

 

“All right, I’ll see you there then, Mr and Mrs - ” Allison squinted at their paperwork.

 

“Chazel,” said the man. “That’s us. Mr and Mrs Chazel.”

 

 


	4. set my teeth in the silver of the moon

Vanya couldn’t focus. Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto and she was coming in late every other bar. She could feel the tension from the others, the sideway glances, the way they rolled their eyes at each other when she missed a beat. _What’s she doing here, wasting all our time? Who even let her in?_

 

(“Always different ones,” said Five. “The house likes it. We can tell.”)

 

Her hands were sweating. The bow was slippery in her fingers, unwieldy as a fish.

 

(“How many?” Her voice shaking. “ _How many_?”)

 

Helen’s solo. Vanya, resting her bow, tried to pay attention to the arcs and loops of her sound. She only sounded like that in her dreams.

 

(Five, opening his hands, fingers spread. Putting them down. Raising them again. “No,” she said, and already it sounded like someone else’s voice, somebody she did not know. “No.”)

 

Sometimes Vanya looked around at the rest of the orchestra and imagined cutting all their throats with a single stroke.

 

(Five turned back to his coffee. “You asked.”)

 

Helen’s bowstring snapped.

 

“Take five,” said the conductor, barely masking the frustration in his voice.

 

In the bathroom, Vanya splashed water on her face. Looked at herself in the mirror, drawn and pale. Curled and uncurled her fingers.

 

She would have to go back to the house. Awake, this time. She needed to talk to Five; she should not have run away from him that night, from the things she did not want to hear.

 

She got her phone from her locker to check for notifications. Updates from some Facebook groups she should never have joined to begin with and a reminder to book her next appointment with the dentist. Forget that. She scrolled through old messages. Saw Leonard’s last text, three months ago now. But she wouldn’t think about that. She stuffed her phone back in the locker, joined the others streaming back into the hall to continue rehearsal. Tonight, she would go back to the house.

 

*

 

Ben had forgotten what it was like to be in a body, which was to say simultaneously exhilarating and terrible. Being around Klaus was like straying from a black-and-white silent film into full Technicolour. As a ghost, one floated around in a sort of emotional stasis - one wouldn’t survive the years otherwise - but on becoming material, everything sharpened unbearably. He wanted to lick doorknobs, run his fingers endlessly through the shag carpet, read A Song Of Ice And Fire cover to cover while lovingly stroking each page. He wanted to kiss people and do worse things to them, which he had read a lot about but knew nothing of in practicality. Along with all this came an overwhelming terror of the moment he would be deprived of it all. Klaus would do his job and leave the house and Ben’s afterlife would go back to the grinding, empty ennui it had been for a decade. Or perhaps Klaus would work out a way for him to simply stop existing. That would be preferable.

 

Ben had been watching Klaus sleep for so long that it had overtaken creepy and was now speeding down the highway of frankly deranged. Klaus had extremely long eyelashes that fluttered when he talked in his sleep, which was often and produced quotable quotes like “damn your watermelon clocks, we’re taking the hashish for Sunday”. He was tender and meat-based and all his cells were slowly dying every second that passed. Ben needed to snap out of it.

 

He got up and walked through the wall into the next room, which he had forgotten Diego had taken over. He was rudely reminded of this at the sight of Diego, back to him, shirtless and doing pull-ups using the curtain rail.

 

Ben clapped a hand over his mouth before he made any mortifying sounds. Perhaps he could just drift quietly out the door without anyone noticing. He turned to do this, registered the now-familiar sensation of solidifying a beat too late, ran smack into the door and fell over.

 

“Morning,” said Klaus, opening said door and then stopping and staring. “Oh. My.”

 

“Does nobody knock in this house?” growled Diego over his shoulder.

 

“Um, no,” said Ben. There was a nasty scar rounding Diego’s shoulder and he tried to fixate on that. Tried. “Mostly we forget doors exist.”

 

“Well,” said Klaus, wide-eyed. “Don’t let us interrupt.”

 

Diego rolled his eyes and switched to doing single-arm pull-ups.

 

“Show off,” said Ben, for appearances. He backed Klaus out of the room and closed the door.

 

“But _did_ you see that - ” began Klaus.

 

“This is too much!” Ben hissed at him. “After ten years! I am not dealing well.”

 

“He’s so _intense_ though,” Klaus went on. “Do you think he does his brooding in the nude too? Or does he need the leather to get in the mood?”

 

Ben tried not to think about it. “Change of subject. Focus on what you’re here to do.”

 

“Riiiight.” Klaus looked like he wanted to demur, but settled into the tone of business. “How many ghosts are there in the house?”

 

“Are we counting loopers?” Ben didn’t really think of the loopers as proper ghosts, more like nasty flashbacks triggered by motion sensors, but a new generation of homeowners would probably beg to differ. “More than a hundred.”

 

Klaus let out a low whistle. “Are you seri - okay. Not counting loopers.”

 

“If you mean sentient entities, there’s me, Leonard and Sir Reginald. And Grace, but she’s almost on the verge of looping.” Fifty years of dealing with being horribly murdered and stuck in the place where it happened would do that to a mind, Ben reckoned. In half a century he’d probably be the same. He didn’t know how Reginald kept it up. Sheer force of will, most likely.

 

“What would make the ghosts want to leave?”

 

Ben gave a short, bitter laugh. “We all want to leave. Most of us, that is - Leonard has unfinished business and Sir Reg is pretty comfortable. He’s the original master of the house, after all. It’s the house that won’t let us go. It’s - I don’t know if you’ve felt it - ”

 

“Sticky,” said Klaus.

 

“Yeah. Sticky.”

 

“What happens if you try to leave?”

 

“Oh, that. Watch.” Ben went back into Diego’s room, stepped over where Diego was now doing push-ups on the floor, flung aside the curtain and shoved the window up. “What are you - ” Diego began. Ben shimmied across the sill and flung himself into the air.

 

The ground rushed up. Ben had done this so many times he didn’t even flinch.

 

The house didn’t always return him consistently. This time, he landed soundlessly on the kitchen floor in the gap between the table and the stove, just as a pair of heels walked past. There were no less than three people in the room.

 

 _Shit_ , thought Ben. _Damn realtors_.

 

*

 

“...and here we are in the absolutely stunning living room,” Allison was saying, leading Mr and Mrs Chazel in. “Will you just look at that ceiling? You could play basketball in here! Not that you would, of course, because of all the authentic Victorian furnishings.  Now if you’ll look at the fireplace - ”

 

Mrs Chazel interrupted her. “Is there a basement?”

 

“Um.” Allison was caught off-guard. “Yes, of course. There is a very expansive basement, and the kitchen is there too. We can look at that next after the ante-rooms on this floor - ”

 

“I want to see the basement now.”

 

“Why?”

 

“My wife is very keen on the basement,” said Mr Chazel. “Because of the...sex dungeon. We would like to put in a sex dungeon.”

 

Mrs Chazel turned and gave him a long, unreadable look.

 

“O-kay.” Allison fervently hoped that Klaus had seen her text and made himself scarce. “We’ll go down this way.”

 

They came out into the kitchen. “I just love the rustic feel,” Allison chattered on, “it’s so hard to find homes this day where the - oh, you’re just going to go into that room. Okay.”

 

The Chazels were going briskly in and out of the rooms off the kitchen. Allison caught up with them and saw they were opening up a large steamer trunk. “What are you do - holy shit.”

 

There was a body in the trunk. A boy. Allison clapped her hands over her mouth.

 

“Hold him down,” said Mrs Chazel to Mr Chazel, and pulled a stake out of her coat.

 

“Holy shit!” gasped Allison. Ghosts were one thing, but she had never actually had a murder during one of her showings before. She was not going to stand for it. As Mrs Chazel raised the stake over her head, Allison tackled her from behind.

 

They went sprawling on the flagstones. Allison tried to keep her pinned, but the woman was _fast_ ; none of Allison’s weekend krav maga classes had prepared her for this. She got an elbow in the ribs, and the agonising shock of it made her loosen her grip. The woman grabbed for the stake, which had rolled under a set of shelves.

 

Somebody came barrelling through the door shouting “Five! No!” He ran straight at Mr Chazel, flailing, and _through_ him. Mr Chazel blanched.

 

“Klaus!” the new guy was screaming, “Klaus! Down here! Help!”

 

Mr Chazel attempted to punch him in the face, realised he could not, and shrugged it off. Mrs Chazel was groping under the shelves for the stake when Allison flung herself on her legs. Mrs Chazel lashed back with a foot and Allison fell back, clutching her face. The other guy was now leaning over the trunk and yelling into the boy’s face. “Wake up, Five! _Wake up_!”

 

Allison’s nose was bleeding. Mrs Chazel stood up, stake in hand. “Stay down, bitch,” she said to Allison, and stepped over her to get to the trunk, whereupon several things happened at once.

 

Klaus ran into the room calling “Ben!” It was not a very large room to begin with, which meant things got extremely crowded. As he ran in, the other guy - Ben - began unzipping his jacket and _something_ erupted from beneath it. Allison could only describe it as a pair of immense, iridescent tentacles. One of them pinned Mrs Chazel against the wall. The other swept Mr Chazel away from the trunk and across the room. He fell into Klaus and the two of them went sprawling.

 

Mrs Chazel stabbed furiously at the tentacle with the stake, which produced gouts of luminous blood. Ben howled in an awful voice of many tongues. The tentacle wrapped around her neck and began squeezing.  

 

“Stop!” boomed Mr Chazel. “Or he gets it.”

 

He was holding a gun to Klaus’s head.

 

Everyone froze.

 

“Drop her,” said Mr Chazel. “Now.”

 

Mrs Chazel slid from the tentacle’s coils, clutching her throat and wheezing. “You let him go,” snarled Ben.

 

“Easy now.” Mr Chazel began backing away, retreating into the kitchen with his arm still wrapped around Klaus. Allison met his frightened gaze. _It’s going to be all right,_ she wanted to tell him, but her nose was still bubbling blood.

 

Mrs Chazel clambered back to her feet. Ben, eyes darting between her and her partner, had shifted to place himself in front of the boy in the trunk.

 

Something flashed past Klaus’s ear. It was a knife, the blade knocking the barrel out of alignment just as the gun went off. Allison dropped to the ground again in terror.

 

When she looked up, Mr Chazel was fighting a man in a black leather outfit.  Seriously, what were all these people doing in her house? Had Klaus turned this into the YMCA while she was gone? Allison would not put it past him.

 

Mrs Chazel seized Klaus and began dragging him towards the stairs. “Hazel!” she shouted. “Come on!” Mr Chazel fought free of the man in black and raced after her - he was surprisingly light on his feet for such a huge man - whereupon Mrs Chazel produced a machine gun out of her impossibly capacious coat and began firing it at abandon.

 

Allison hit the ground again, as did the man in leather. Ben was not so lucky; he collapsed over the trunk, strafed by bullets. The Chazels disappeared up the stairs, Klaus with them.  Allison scrambled over to Ben, who was bleeding strangely dark blood. “Never mind,” Ben croaked. “Go...go after them.”

 

“Come on,” said the man in black at her elbow, and took off running without waiting to see if she would follow. Allison did not know this guy, but he had a lot of sharp knives and he seemed to care about Klaus’s welfare, so she raced after him.

 

They sprinted down the front hall and got through the door just in time to see the Chazels bundle Klaus into the trunk of a beat-up Chevy and Luther cross the road, holding a newspaper and a gallon of milk. He stopped short when he saw her. “Allison? What happened to your nose?”

 

“Those maniacs are kidnapping my medium!”

 

Luther turned just as Mr Chazel put a foot on the gas, dropped the milk and slapped his palm down on the fender of the car. The car jerked and stayed on the spot, vibrating. Luther slammed both hands down on the car and seemed, somehow, to hold it there, until Mr Chazel suddenly put it in reverse, crashing into the car behind and spinning free of Luther’s grip.

 

Allison had so many questions, but right now she was occupied with getting into her own car. To none of her surprise, the man in black slid into the backseat. She was more shocked when Luther opened the passenger door and squeezed in.

 

“You’re coming?”

 

“Yeah,” said Luther, buckling in. “You look like you could use a hand.”

 

“What are you waiting for?” shouted the man in black from behind them. “Go, go, go!”

 

Allison floored it.

 

*

 

Vanya stood in the open doorway of the house.  “Hello?”

 

The door had been unlocked. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Vanya edged further in. She had never seen the house in the day - it was much grander, but also its age showed. She recalled the banner on the front and wondered if there was a viewing going on now. “Hello?” she tried again.

 

“Vanya.”

 

A figured stepped out of the gloom under the staircase. Even at this distance, Vanya recognised the gait, the plaid of his shirt, his slow smile.

 

“You,” she breathed.

 

“Hey, babe,” said Leonard.


	5. true only to the noise of worms

“You’ve gone and taken the wrong one, haven’t you?”

 

Klaus came to muzzily. People were shouting at each other behind him. It hurt his ears.

 

“What was I supposed to do, Cha-Cha? Let Doctor Octopus continue strangling you? What the hell was that about anyway - they should have said this wasn’t a regular job. We oughta get hazard pay for this kind of thing.”

 

Klaus tried to get his bearings. He was in a motel room with wallpaper that looked like it was trying to replicate the inside of a digestive organ. He had been tied to a chair. So far so Saturday night, except this was beginning to look like the kind of situation where there weren’t any safewords.

 

“Well, Hazel, what are we going to do with him?”

 

“Don’t look at me. Drain him later, I don’t care.”

 

Klaus began to scream, muffled by the gag they had shoved into his mouth.

 

“Shit. He’s awake.” The couple who had kidnapped him came around to peer at him. The man - Hazel - ripped the gag out of Klaus’s mouth.

 

“What do you know about Five?”

 

“Who?” spluttered Klaus. “Oh, the kid vampire. Just met him yesterday, your guess is as good as mine, can I go now?”

 

The woman punched him. Klaus, though deceptively scrawny, had taken a few punches with panache in his time, but this one felt like somebody had driven a tanker into his kidney.

 

“I’m just the medium,” he grit out. “Allison hired me to deal with the ghosts. I didn’t sign on for any vampire shit.”

 

“Oh, you’re certainly dealing with the ghosts all right,” Hazel shot back.

 

Klaus laughed, a tad hysterically. “I mean, have you seen the ghosts in that place, can you blame me for trying? This job doesn’t come with a lot of perks. I take what I can get.”

 

The woman - Cha-Cha - threw her hands up in exasperation. She and Hazel moved off to a corner to confer in hushed tones, punctuated by violent gestures.

 

Klaus, swimming in and out of consciousness, noted the room was beginning to get crowded. This was the part he always hated most about meeting new people, or even taking public transport. And Hazel and Cha-Cha, to his complete lack of surprise, had not been idle.

 

Some of the newcomers were adults. They slouched around with holes in their middles or stood by the window, blackened and smouldering onto the curtains. But what was most alarming was that the majority were children.  

 

“Psst,” Klaus hissed at the nearest one, a little blue-eyed girl with blonde ringlets on her head, which she was carrying under her arm. “What’s the deal with these two?”

 

The girl started. “You can see us?”

 

“Long story,” said Klaus. “Assume yes. Did they kill you?”

 

The girl’s head rolled its forget-me-not eyes. “A child vampire is an abomination to the Temps Aeternalis. I was hunted by Daywalkers from the moment of my birth, not that I ever asked to be made.”

 

“Pretty shit deal,” agreed Klaus. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

 

“Claudine,” said the girl sniffily, “and don’t you ‘sweetheart’ me, young man, I’m threescore years old.”

 

“Sorry, ma’am. Can you scoot over here real quick? I want to try something.”

 

Claudine looked mistrustful, but fixed her head back on her neck and came over to Klaus.

 

“Who are you talking to?” Cha-Cha demanded from across the room.

 

“Put your hand on me,” Klaus went on hurriedly. Cha-Cha had got up and was striding over. “Do it quick, now.”

 

Claudine wrapped her hand around Klaus’s elbow. She felt the change at once; her face lit up. “Atta girl,” said Klaus. “Now which one of them took your head off?”

 

Claudine jerked her head at the advancing Cha-Cha. “That one.”

 

“Have at her.”

 

Claudine grinned, whipped off her head and slung it like a bowling ball into Cha-Cha’s gobsmacked face.

 

*

 

“Shouldn’t we call the cops?” suggested Luther as Allison made another hairpin turn.

 

“No cops,” said the man in the back seat, who had introduced himself as Diego and who looked like the exact sort of person who would not want any cops involved if he could help it. “Take the next left, then sharp right.”

 

Luther looked for guidance to Allison, who merely sighed and said: “I hate it, but there’s so much of this we’ll have trouble explaining to the cops and it'll cost us time.”

 

“Try me,” said Luther.

 

“We’re in pursuit of two psychos who tried to kill a kid - “

 

“Who is a vampire,” put in Diego. “You wanna merge onto the expressway now.”

 

“ - who is a _what_? - okay, who is a vampire, and also then they kidnapped the guy I hired to exorcise the haunted house I’m trying to sell, but not before they shot at me and this other guy, but I'm not too worried about him because I’m pretty sure he died ten years ago.”

 

“That is a lot of dependent clauses in one sentence,” conceded Luther. This was not how he had expected his morning to turn out. He still wasn’t sure why he had got into a car with a woman he had met yesterday and a man who looked like the subject of the song Mack The Knife. But Allison had needed help and something primal and undeniable that had always lurked in Luther, had always intimated he was not doing everything he could be doing with his life, had raised its head. Now here he was. He was committed.

 

“Right?” said Allison, ignorant of his internal monologue. “Much as I hate to agree with Ninja Turtle in the back, I think we’re on our own for now.”

 

“Take the next exit,” said Diego. “What did you call me?”

 

“Oh, don’t even get me started about how you seem to be squatting on the property I’m selling!”

 

“We can have that conversation later,” said Diego mulishly.

 

“We _will_ have that conversation later,” retorted Allison ominously. “Now focus on directions, hotshot.”

 

“They’re heading south.” Diego squinted at Allison’s phone. “Why do you have access to Klaus’s Find My Phone app, anyway?”

 

“If you’ve known Klaus as long as I have, you’d know he needs tracking.”

 

“How long _have_ you known Klaus?”

 

“Since college. We were in musical theatre club. He cast me in his end-of-year production of Cabaret.” Allison laughed wryly. “I was Sally Bowles, of course. I was going to go and be famous in Hollywood and he was going to be an auteur of some sort - except neither of us made the cut, I went into real estate and he went into drugs.”

 

“I think you’d have been a great actress,” said Luther.

 

“Thank you,” said Allison.

 

“Ugh,” put in Diego. “Rescue mission, folks, pay attention, I regret I ever asked. Okay, pull up here. They stopped a block up.”

 

The app had led them to a shady motel. “What’s our gameplan?” said Allison.

 

“We go in, grab Klaus, stab whoever stops us and leave,” said Diego. He had produced a butterfly knife and was spinning it worryingly close to Luther’s face.

 

“They have guns, you idiot,” Allison shot back at him. “We’ll be shot up before we even get close.”

 

“Then you cause a distraction in the parking lot, Superman and I go in and grab Klaus, and then we leave.”

 

“Why do I cause the distraction?” Allison demanded. “Because I’m a girl, is that it?”

 

“No,” said Diego impatiently, “because I have a fuckton of knives and Luther here can stop a car with one hand, and I don’t know what you bring to the table besides musical theatre.”

 

Allison struck the dashboard in frustration, but did not gainsay him.

 

“Give us two minutes to get up there,” Diego went on. “And keep the engine running.”

 

Luther followed him across the parking lot. “Ever been in a fight before?” said Diego conversationally.

 

“Not really, no.” Luther tried really, really hard not to get into fights with people. Mostly for their sake.

 

Diego nodded. “It’s not so bad. Stay out of my way, you’ll be fine. Would hate to knife you by accident.”

 

“Please try not to,” said Luther.  

 

Diego clapped him on the shoulder in what he must think was a comradely fashion.

 

The app wasn’t too clear on which room Klaus and his kidnappers were in. Luther wanted to ask reception. Diego vetoed this. They were having a hushed argument about how to proceed when all hell broke loose on one of the upper floors.

 

“Is that the distraction?” Luther wondered. He and Diego looked over at Allison, who was still in the parking lot. She made a gesture of confusion at them. “Come on,” said Diego, and took the stairs two at a time.

 

Luther kicked in the door of the room where the noise was coming from and was greeted with an unholy mess. Klaus was there, bound to a chair that had been tipped onto its side. The couple who had kidnapped him were beset by what seemed to be a crowd of bloodthirsty children. The man was holding off two little boys in sailor suits who were clawing at him. The woman had a semi-automatic out and was now firing at the rest of the children, yelling blue murder. Luther flung himself out of the way of the bullets.

 

Diego chanced a look, then ducked back as more shots rang out. He hefted a knife off his person and threw it at Luther. Luther started in shock, but the knife swerved almost at a right angle and hurtled through the doorway. There was a scream.

 

“How’d you do that?”

 

“Physics and I have never really been on talking terms,” said Diego. He flung another knife into the fray, then crouched and ran into the room.

 

Luther followed. Diego was trying to cut Klaus loose. One of the children, a little blonde girl, paused in her onslaught when she saw what they were doing. “Oh no you don’t,” she hissed, and sank her teeth into Diego’s neck.

 

Diego cursed and fell backwards. Luther seized the girl and flung her across the room. She hit the wall at a horrible angle and crumpled to the floor. Her head came off and rolled towards them. “Mine!” it snarled. “We’re keeping him!”

 

“Oh come on, Claudine!” shouted Klaus. “I do you guys _one favour_ \- ”

 

Luther picked Klaus up, chair and all, and fled, Diego limping in his wake. Unearthly shrieks followed them down the stairwell. Allison had the car doors open. “Hurry, hurry,” she was saying as they tried and failed to fit Klaus-plus-chair into the back. Luther hastily snapped the chair legs off, shoved Klaus in atop a bleeding Diego and climbed into the passenger seat. Allison took off.

 

“I think that went pretty well, all things considered,” said Klaus from where his face was mashed into Diego’s thigh. “Yay team.”

 

“Fuck,” muttered Diego, and passed out.

 

*

 

Vanya said: “I thought you were gone. You stopped replying my - I thought you were ghosting me.”

 

“That’s a poor choice of words.” Leonard stepped forward into the light, which played over the gaping wound that had been his eye.

 

Vanya gasped. “Who did that to you?”

 

“Wow.” Leonard cocked his head to one side, almost bird-like. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

 

“I have gaps,” Vanya babbled, “I’ve been sleepwalking, F - somebody - said I’ve been coming to the house and k - ” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

 

“Figures,” said Leonard. “When’s the last time you remember seeing me?”

 

“Three months ago. It was our anniversary and you said you wanted to do something special, you told me to meet you at - ” There it was, on the tip of her tongue, but Vanya couldn’t push it out. She tried again. “At - ”

 

Leonard waited. When she stumbled over it a third time, he said, “Interesting.” And then, “Why don’t you come downstairs with me? There’s something you should see.”

 

Vanya let herself be led down a staircase and through rooms she had never seen. How deep did this place go? She followed Leonard down a disused maintenance passage, thick with cobwebs. Leonard gestured at an ancient torchlight in a wall bracket. “Grab that. We’ll need it in a bit.”

 

Vanya took it out of the bracket and realised, to her surprise, that unlike everything else in this passage, it was not dusty.

 

Ahead, Leonard was shouldering open a huge metal door. “Careful. It gets a bit narrow from here on.”

 

Vanya paused on the threshold. “I don’t like small spaces, Leonard.”

 

“Don’t be a baby,” he said. He held out his hand. “It’s just for a second, we’ll be quick.”

 

Behind the door was a kind of tunnel that was at points practically a crawlspace. They had to walk almost bent double.

 

“Something smells really bad,” remarked Vanya, playing the torchlight beam on the gunk that lined the walls.

 

“We’re close to the sewer,” came Leonard’s voice from ahead. “Don’t worry, this tunnel is well insulated. No leaks down here.”

 

Finally the tunnel opened up into a sort of cavern. The smell was so thick here one could almost see it hanging in the air. Vanya covered her mouth with her sleeve.

 

“Why are we here?” she managed, in between the smallest breaths she could possibly take.

 

Leonard spread his arms out. “Take a look, babe.”

 

Vanya took a step forward, swaying. Something crunched under her foot. She looked down.

 

It was a hand. It lay on its back, white, like a dead crab. It had been neatly severed at the wrist.

 

She swung the torchlight around wildly. Body parts littered the mildewed floor. Arms, thighs, all manner of severed limbs. Torsos, propped against the walls. Legs spread-eagled on the floor, bloated and putrefying.

 

There was a low keening sound in the air. It might have been coming from her.

 

“You surpassed my expectations, Vanya,” said Leonard. “I’m very proud. Even if you did take me by surprise.”

 

The torchlight beam swept over a figure that seemed to be sitting with its back against the wall farthest from the entrance. It was in an advanced state of decay, but even so, she could recognise the plaid pattern of its bloodied shirt. Maggots writhed in the hole where an eye should have been.

 

Vanya gazed upon the dead body of Leonard and screamed.

 

A wave of nausea hit her. She retched, her body spasming wildly, sick all over the bits and pieces of people on the floor. She had dropped the torch and could not bring herself to reach down to pick it up. Reeling, she stumbled back down the tunnel, towards the light of the doorway -

 

Which shut.

 

The screech and clang of the bolt sliding home was like a rent in her soul. She reached the door too late. She beat her fists bloody against the rusting metal. She sank to her knees, still screaming. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to! I’m sorry!”

 

There was no answer, just the dark.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have borrowed from two different vampire mythologies (Interview With The Vampire and Blade) for the Temps Aeternalis. When I was young I thought Kirsten Dunst's portrayal of Claudia in Interview With The Vampire was the best thing, especially when she got to cut Tom Cruise's throat.


	6. yours is the music for no instrument

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise Labour Day update! I'm surprised too.

“You know, I don’t think Diego likes hospitals,” said Klaus.

 

“Too late,” Allison snapped back, “I wasn’t about to let him bleed to death in my car. Anyway, nobody likes hospitals, but it doesn’t mean we don’t go to them when we need to, does it?”

 

“Well yes,” said Klaus, “but he specifically has something against hospitals. Perhaps he hasn’t got health insurance.”

 

“I’m definitely recommending him some names when he gets out of here. What _is_ it that he does, anyway? Why is he covered in knives _and_ stab wounds that are only partially healed? When the nurse asked me about that, I didn’t know what to say!”

 

“Which is a good reaction, right?” Klaus clasped and unclasped his fingers nervously. “Because our cover story is that we picked him up on the side of the road. We’re just Good Samaritans on a road trip. We don’t know how this guy got mauled by - wild animals, or whatever.”

 

They watched in silence as across the waiting room, Luther attempted to convince the vending machine to either give him a protein bar or his quarters back.

 

“I’m sorry,” said Allison after a while. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this. I thought you could handle it - I thought _I_ could handle it - but clearly we’re out of our league.” She put her head in her hands. “Sometimes I want something so badly and I can’t - I can’t see everything else around it. That’s how I lost Claire. I almost lost you.”

 

“You did come to get me though.” Klaus patted Allison’s knee.

 

“That was mostly Diego. And Luther.” Who, in frustration, kicked the vending machine. It caused a sizeable dent. Luther glanced around to see if anyone had noticed and edged sheepishly away.

 

“He’s really gone on you, isn’t he?” remarked Klaus fondly. “I mean, if he came along to rescue little ol’ me just because you batted your lashes at him.”

 

“I did no such thing,” said Allison uncomfortably. “Look, I’m going to check in on Claire.”

 

Patrick wouldn’t let her talk to Claire. “It’s her dinnertime, Allison, it’s hard enough to get her to eat everything on her plate as it is without you distracting her.”

 

“Well, how was I supposed to know you’d moved dinner up?” said Allison testily.

 

“You let her sleep far too late and you know it.”

 

“Well, you try reading her to sleep!”

 

“I _have_. And you know what, all it took was a bit of patience. Which you could have used.”

 

“For the love of - ” Allison bit off the sentence, took a deep breath and composed herself. “Okay. Fine. I’ll call back before her bedtime. Whenever that is now.”

 

“Text first. I’ll let you know if you can call.” He hung up.

 

Allison resisted the urge to throw her phone through the glass of the fire alarm and settled for thunking her head against the wall.

 

“Custody troubles?”

 

There was an older man in the corridor, watching her. He had slicked-back hair and an accent - Russian, maybe.

 

“I don’t see it’s any of your business,” said Allison tartly.

 

The man held up his hands in a placating gesture. “No, no, I relate. I too, I have my boy. He’s with his mother now. I am to have him on Sundays, but always she is cancelling at the last minute, you know?”

 

“Yeah,” Allison reluctantly conceded. “I know.”

 

“But we take what we can get, eh?” The man looked at her, considering. “I think I have seen you before. You are famous?”

 

“Ha, no. I work in real estate. Maybe you’ve seen my banners around town.”

 

“That must be it. You have a card?”

 

Allison fished in her pocket for her namecards. The man took one and nodded appreciatively. “Allison Jones. Sadly my ex-wife took the house, but if not I would have asked you to sell it for me.”

 

“You wouldn’t happen to need a new place, would you?” quipped Allison. “I’ve got a line on some nice bachelor pads.”

 

“If I decide, you will be the first I call.” The man tucked her card into his pocket. “It is nice to meet you, Ms Jones.”

 

“And you too - ”

 

“Sergei.”

 

“Nice to meet you, Sergei. I’ve got to get back to my friends now.”

 

Klaus had gone to check if Diego had been assigned a ward yet, Luther informed her when she returned. “Public hospitals, huh.”

 

“I mean, you don’t have to hang around,” said Allison apologetically. “We can sort out this mess from here. Not,” she added hastily, “that I don’t want you to hang around. But don’t feel obliged.”

 

“I was actually going to ask you if you wanted to get dinner,” said Luther.

 

“Oh,” said Allison. “Okay.”

 

“Don’t feel obliged,” Luther went on.

 

“You did just run into a nest of gunfire and vampires to save my friend,” pointed out Allison. “I kind of do feel obliged - ”

 

“Really, don’t,” began Luther, now looking panicked.

 

“ - but you know, I’d have agreed anyway,” finished Allison. “If our leather-clad friend doesn’t die and nothing else crazy happens at the house then yeah, sure, we can get dinner. I will buy you dinner. It is the least I could do.”

 

“Great,” said Luther.

 

“Great,” said Allison.

 

Across the waiting room, the vending machine belatedly spat out a protein bar, sputtered and died.

 

*

 

“Fucking Daywalkers,” snarled Five. “Now I’ll have to move.”

 

Ben swallowed his dismay. “Does it make sense to keep running? If they found you here, they’ll find you again.”

 

“I’ll just have to be more careful.”

 

“Maybe we could talk to them.”

 

Five scoffed. “You can’t reason with a Daywalker. They take orders only from the Temps Aeternalis. They’re bred specially to hunt renegades like me. Think of them as...Vampire Interpol.”

 

“Why do they hunt child vampires? That seems cruel.”

 

“Child vampires are an abomination to the Aeternalis. They’re not well-equipped to deal with immortality. Most of them go mad.”

 

Ben stared at him. “Are you - ”

 

“Mad? Yes.” Five waved that away dismissively. “Other than that I’m quite functional, thank you. I was always a cut above the rest. Not that they took that into consideration.”

 

“Can you beat them? If it’s night?”

 

Five contemplated this. “If it was anyone else I’d say yes. But this is Hazel and Cha-Cha. They’re the best of that lot. It’d be a tough call.”

 

“Better than running, though.”

 

Five narrowed his eyes. “You just want me to go after them because they’ve got your pets.”

 

“They only took Klaus because he was trying to help save you,” said Ben severely. “While you were in your sun-coma. If anything happens to him, that’s on you.”

 

Five sighed. “Right. They could be anywhere in the city, though. Until your friends get in touch, there’s nothing we can do but sit tight.”

 

“Number Five! Number Six!”

 

Ben and Five glanced over at Sir Reginald, who had just charged into the room. “Stop wasting time!” he shouted.

 

“Oh, not this again,” groaned Ben. “Reg, this is really not a good moment.”

 

“ _You_ don’t understand,” barked Sir Reginald. “Somebody needs to do something about Number Seven, and you’re just sitting here chatting over sundry matters.”

 

“Klaus isn’t a sundry matter - ”

 

“No, wait,” cut in Five. “Number Seven. He’s never mentioned a Number Seven before.”

 

“Well, thank you, Five,” said Sir Reginald primly. “At least somebody is keeping count.”

 

“If you could stop being so bloody cryptic,” growled Five.

 

“Cryptic?” Sir Reginald made a frustrated, expansive gesture. “Listen, for heaven’s sakes. Just listen.”

 

They listened.

 

“That’s a - do you hear a violin?”

 

“Sibelius. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Five slid off the trunk and stalked to the door.

 

They ran down the corridor, the walls of which were beginning to rattle. Dust rose as the building shook. “Is that an earthquake?” Ben wanted to know.

 

“Shh.” Five was tracking the faint sound of the violin, which was getting harder and harder to hear over the creak and rumble of the building. He clattered down a flight of steps and into a maintenance passage. When Ben caught up with him, he was struggling with a heavy metal door.

 

Unable to help on that front, Ben drifted through the door and saw what was happening inside.

 

It was the Violinist, standing in the midst of the charnel house that the crawlspace had become. She was in the form that most terrified him, her body gone bone white and moulded into seamless curves, enveloped in a brilliant, unearthly glow. The violin grew out of her arm like a bud from a stalk, the bow moving so fast that it was a blur. She was facing away from him. “Hey!” Ben tried, but she did not seem to hear him over her playing. The walls shivered with it.

 

“Ugh, it’s rank in here.” Five had got the door open. Now he caught up with Ben and stood appraising the Violinist. “She’s turning sound into kinetic energy. She’ll bring down the house if she keeps this up.”

 

“How do we stop her playing?”

 

Five apparated. In the next breath he was standing behind the Violinist. He clapped his hands over her ears.  

 

The violin shrieked, or the Violinist did. It was an inhuman sound. She spun around wildly, pushing Five away and lashing out with the bow.

 

“Five?” said the Violinist. The glow was fading from her. “Oh shit, Five.”

 

Five made a sort of answering gurgle. Then he collapsed in two.

  



	7. and stitch, upon the dead day’s shroud

Diego awoke, which meant he wasn’t dead, but also he was in a hospital, which was almost as bad. Somebody had even put him on a drip. Diego yanked it out in horror.

 

“Hey, you’re up,” said Klaus, who was sitting cross-legged at the foot of his bed in all defiance of hospital hygiene. “Oh no, don’t do that!”

 

“I said no hospitals!” hissed Diego.

 

Klaus put his hands up. “That was Allison’s idea. She didn’t like what you were doing to the upholstery.”

 

“Did you not tell her I was a vigilante?”

 

“I’m not going around outing people like that,” huffed Klaus. “It’s rude.”

 

Diego sat up, noting to his dismay that he was in a hospital gown. “Where are my clothes?”

 

Klaus held up a plastic bag. “I’m afraid they took all the knives away.”

 

“Shit.” Diego tried to blink away a creeping headache and failed. Days of consecutive blood loss would do that to a person. He considered, for one second, lying down and going back to sleep. But no.

 

“I need to get out of this place.”

 

“Are we doping and dashing?” Klaus nodded knowingly. “I get that. But you should rest, really. The nurse said you’d taken a beating. A lot of beatings.”

 

“Klaus.” Diego cupped a hand around his jaw. Klaus went still. “Did I or did I not save you?”

 

Klaus swallowed. “You did.”

 

“Okay,” said Diego. “So get me out of here.”

 

They were sneaking down the corridor, looking for a free bathroom for Diego to change in, when Diego heard somebody speaking Russian. He yanked Klaus into the nearest supply closet.

 

“Not that I’m complaining,” said Klaus, “but I thought we were in the middle of something - ”

 

Diego clapped a hand over his mouth and listened through the crack in the door. There were three of them, speaking to each other in low Russian. Which he didn’t understand, but the surreptitious hand-hovering over hidden holsters and the not-so-subtle sticking of heads into wards and looking around spoke volumes.

 

“It’s the Russian mafia,” he said in Klaus’ ear. “They know I’m here.”

 

“I know it’s a life-or-death situation,” Klaus breathed, “but it’s really tickly when you do that.”

 

“Text Allison. Tell her to get out of the hospital.”

 

Klaus tried and failed to turn on his phone. “Damn, it’s dead.”

 

Diego took stock of the supply closet. Latex gloves, metal trays, syringes - syringes! Diego hated needles with a burning if irrational passion, but he was all right if they went into other people. He began taking things off the shelves and stuffing them into Klaus’ hands. “Carry that for me, will you?” He found a rack of scissors. “Now _that’s_ what I’m talking about, baby.”

 

“Do you ever flirt with people like you do metal objects?” wondered Klaus, moving everything into the plastic bag. “Asking for a friend.”

 

Diego chanced another look through the crack and saw that one of the Russians was approaching the closet with some suspicion. “Shit, they’re coming, get behind me.”

 

“Wait, idea.” Klaus took him by the shoulders and rearranged them so that his back was in between Diego and the line of sight from the door. “Trust me,” he said. Then he leaned forward and kissed Diego.

 

It was a leisurely kiss. Diego found himself admiring, in some distant capacity, the ability to kiss like that when you were seconds from possible death. Klaus licked up into his mouth and a couple of Diego’s synapses misfired then and there, but enough remained intact such that when the Russian opened the door, stopped and stared at them in confusion, Diego was able to hurl a syringe into his eye.

 

“Stay in the closet!” he told Klaus, leaping over the prone man. “I’ll lead them away.”

 

“Not on your life!” Klaus pelted after him.

 

The other two men in the corridor had turned when they heard their comrade scream. Diego stabbed one with the scissors and introduced the other’s face to the glass over the fire alarm. “Tray!” he yelled at Klaus over the shrilling of the alarm, caught the metal tray Klaus slung to him and beat the man around the head with it for good measure.

 

“This way,” said Klaus, sprinting down another corridor and into a stairwell. Diego followed, trying to ignore how he was still uncomfortably turned on, which was not a good look in a hospital gown.

 

“You really know your way around hospitals,” he remarked as Klaus exited on a different floor, now filling up with confused people trying to work out if this was a fire drill or an actual emergency.

 

“I’ve spent enough time in them,” said Klaus darkly. “Drugs and dead folks everywhere you look, what’s not to love.”

 

Diego spotted more Russians - really, they had a very distinctive look - in the crowd. “Three more on our six,” he told Klaus, who threw a glance over his shoulder and then ducked down another of the identical white corridors. They hurried down another flight of stairs and through several sets of glass doors, and then they were in the lobby, which was a problem because it was full of Russians and they all spotted Diego at once.

 

“Everybody get down!” shouted Diego, grabbed the supplies from Klaus and ran for it.

 

Fortunately none of the Russians pulled a gun - the lobby was too packed for it - but they all converged upon Diego. Diego, still running flat out, started throwing random shit - syringes, thermometers and one wonky heart rate monitor - at them. He was almost at the door when one of them tackled him and he went down in a flurry of legs and fists.

 

For an awful stretch, he was buried under a seething pile of bodies, and then suddenly light broke through and he saw a couple of the Russians go flying through the air. Luther’s face appeared in the gap.

 

“We left you alone for a _minute_ ,” he said reproachfully.

 

“What can I say?” Diego shot back. “My milkshake brings all the gangs to the yard.”

 

Luther grabbed him and actually _shook_ the Russians off him, as if he was shaking dust off a doormat, and then hauled him towards the exit. Allison was waiting in the car outside, looking hugely annoyed. “Explain.”

 

“I have a $1.5 million bounty on my head,” said Diego, scrambling over so Klaus could get in.

 

“Wow.” Allison let out a whistle. Diego could practically see her calculating how much that was in properties. Perhaps he was now the human equivalent of a townhouse.

 

As they slid out of the hospital driveway, he accidentally made eye contact with Klaus, who held his gaze for a good three seconds, then coughed meaningfully and looked out of the window.

 

“I guess it’s back to the house, then,” said Luther.

 

*

 

“This way!” shouted the ghost as he ran ahead of Vanya through the maze of hallways that was the back of the house.

 

Five was heavier than she had expected. The stroke had all but bisected him through the midriff and now she was trying to keep the two halves together. Her shirtfront was growing heavy with blood.

 

They rounded the corner and entered what seemed to be a laboratory. The ghost - Ben - gestured for Vanya to prop Five on the operating table. “Make sure nothing falls out.”

 

A blonde woman in a cornflower blue dress came into the room and started at the sight. “Oh, my. What happened here?”

 

“Grace!” exclaimed Ben. “Where’s the duct tape?”

 

“Oh, goodness.” Grace pressed her hands together anxiously. “There should be some in the cupboard under the stairs. That’s the back stairs, the one by the laundry.”

 

“This way,” said Ben to Vanya, and took off running again.

 

Vanya focussed on keeping up, which took her mind off the crawlspace. Something prismatically dreadful had occurred in there, something that had knocked the two halves of her into one another with blinding force and filled up all the gaps in her.

 

_Kill her, says Leonard._

 

_What? She looks down at the sleeping child between them. No._

 

_Remember what I told you, says Leonard. That you are special. That there is more to you than you have ever realised, that you were chosen for something greater than your mind can conceive. That you and I can have this power, if only we do this one thing._

 

_I didn’t think you meant this! she cries. Who is she? Where did you find her?_

 

_It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter. Only this, only what we do in this place._

 

_No, she says, her voice shaking. No, I won’t._

 

_Vanya. His hands close around her arms as she trembles, flinches away from him. His voice hard. His fingers pressing, bruising. Vanya, don’t let me down now. Or are you not who I thought you were?_

 

_(And here is the crack. Here the split. Now she can observe it happen, part of her mind peeling away to curl in on itself, another part unfurling out of the dark, pure and irresistible and filling her being with light.)_

 

_There is a roaring in her ears, like the house is singing to her._

 

_Vanya? he says, and there is something in his tone she has not heard before. Uncertainty._

 

_Oh, darling, she says in a new voice, rich and strange. She feels the power crackle in her bones. I am so much more._

 

The duct tape was in the cupboard, like Grace had said. Vanya sprinted back to the lab.

 

“We’re not seriously taping him back together,” she said as she cut Five’s shirt off and wrapped tape around his middle under Ben and Grace’s supervision. “How does that even work?”

 

“It’s not like I’ve done this before,” said Ben. “People don’t cut my friends in half very often. I don’t want to risk him sealing off into two bits, like an earthworm.”

 

Five now looked like a fragile parcel dispatched by a paranoid sender. “Now what?” said Vanya.

 

“Now we need to feed him,” said Ben. “By we I mean you, because we have no blood to speak of and also this is entirely your doing.”

 

Vanya stared at the unconscious Five. “Do I just...bleed on him?”

 

“Maybe nick a vein or something,” suggested Ben. “Hold it over his mouth.”

 

Vanya propped open Five’s jaw. There were the fangs, which he’d hidden so well when they spoke in the diner. She held a wrist to them, hesitating.

 

“Will it kill me?”

 

“I don’t know,” said Ben honestly. “It might.”

 

“Well,” said Vanya, voice shaking, “maybe it should. Maybe that’s what I deserve.”

 

Ben opened and shut his mouth, but seemed unable to come up with something to say.

 

Vanya shut her eyes and gashed open her wrist on a fang. Felt the blood gush hot over her skin.

 

_There are many children in the city, says the White Violin, and there are people who would hurt them. Like you._

 

_Leonard hangs in the air before her in the front hall, splayed like an insect on a pinboard. The child sleeps oblivious beneath his body._

 

_I was wrong, he says, and stops to hack up blood. I was wrong._

 

_The White Violin cocks her head. I’m listening._

 

_It wasn’t me the house wanted. It was you all along._

 

_He begins to laugh, a terrible, gurgling laugh. It ends when she puts the bow through his eye._

 

Vanya swayed, but kept her feet. Five was not yet awake, but he had latched onto the wound in her wrist and seemed now to be drinking from it. She clutched at the table with her other hand.

 

“You okay?” said Ben.

 

“I don’t know,” said Vanya faintly. “I feel like - ”

 

_She picks up the child in her arms. She will leave her somewhere, a police station, a doorstep._

 

_There are many men in the city, says the White Violin, now to herself and the sleeping child. I think we could do without some of them._

 

Vanya woke up on the floor in immeasurable pain. Everything was leaking out of her. She tried to scream but found she had not even the strength for that.

 

After what seemed an eternity, the pain slowly abated. Vanya opened her eyes to see Five slump back against the foot of the operating table. Behind it, Ben and Grace stared at them in horror. Five wiped his bloody mouth with the back of his hand.

 

“There,” he said. “I’d say that makes us even, doesn’t it?”

  



	8. the root of the root and the bud of the bud

“So you’re a serial killer,” said Five. “Now what?”

 

They had migrated to the den next to the kitchen, because the lab was not a nice place to hang out and have a conversation about how they had all, at some point in the not-too-distant past, murdered a bunch of people. Except Grace, who was just humming and wiping down imaginary dishes in the background.

 

“Step one,” went on Five. His counselling manner was somewhat ruined by the fact that he was lying on his back on the couch, because things were still a little iffy around his internal organs. “Recognise that you are not alone.”

 

“I don’t see how that helps,” said Vanya miserably.

 

“I’m trying to give you a sense of perspective,” said Five, attempting to be patient. “This is a problem a lot of people go through.”

 

“I thought ‘step one’ was ‘acknowledge the problem’,” Ben chipped in.

 

“Right, yes,” said Five testily, “but she’s already done that. With explosive results. Step two - ”

 

“Step three,” said Ben.

 

“Step _three,”_ said Five through gritted teeth, “is to recognise that guilt is not productive.”

 

“How _can’t_ I be guilty?” cried Vanya. “I know she - I - tried to choose men whom she thought were harming others. The same way you choose people to feed on. But she’s an elemental force, not a rational entity! She wouldn’t have done...oh, I don’t know, due diligence.”

 

“I didn’t say you couldn’t feel guilty,” said Five. “I’m just saying, it’s not productive. It’s not going to bring anybody back. You’ve got to move on.”

 

“Do you feel guilt?” asked Vanya.

 

“No. But I’m insane, apparently.” Five shrugged. “I’m not a good example. Look at Ben. Ben feels very guilty. He’s killed more people than you, by the way.”

 

“By accident,” said Ben unhappily.

 

“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” said Five. “They were all very bad, truly dire people who got him killed to begin with, and he’s still hung up about it, but he’s got on with his life. Afterlife.”

 

“I really don’t think this is helping her,” Ben told him.

 

“ _Fine_ ,” huffed Five, crossing his arms and then hastily uncrossing them because his ribs were apparently not quite done with renovations yet. “You do it then.”

 

“Vanya,” said Ben gently, “do you remember when all this started? What started it?”

 

“The first time I remember her appearing was that night, when Leonard asked me to meet him here,” said Vanya, scrunching up her face in recollection. “But she must have been in me for much longer than that. When I was little - ” She hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know.”

 

“Just tell us,” said Five. “You’ve touched my intestines. I think we can be frank with one another.”

 

“Since I was little, I’ve had anxiety,” said Vanya slowly. “Or so my parents told me. They put me on medication, and I continued taking it after they died. A few weeks after I met Leonard, I ran out of meds. My supply just - wasn’t there. I thought I’d been careless about getting my prescription filled. I meant to go get more, just that I was so busy with the orchestra and I just - kept forgetting. And everything was fine.” She put her head in her hands. “I thought I wasn’t having any more panic attacks. But I wasn’t getting panic attacks, I was getting her.”

 

“How’d you meet Leonard?” asked Ben.

 

“He was my student,” said Vanya. “He was a little older than my usual, of course, but he wanted to learn the violin because of his late father. And he just seemed so...sweet, you know. He kept telling me I was really special. And I never thought that, at all, but when I was with him I could _believe_ it.”

 

Ben exchanged a look with Five.

 

“He told me the world didn’t deserve me,” Vanya went on. “He said one day we would show them together.”

 

“Vanya,” said Five, “I think you should know that even before that night, Leonard was already coming to the house.”

 

“What?”

 

“He was here a lot,” said Ben. “He came and tried to talk to me about what happened. When I realised what he was after, I avoided him, but by that time he knew how much power the house had.”

 

“What was he after?” breathed Vanya.

 

“We think he wanted to perform a ritual sacrifice,” said Ben. “He made a pact with the house, you see. Victims in exchange for power.”

 

“He was grooming you to be his partner,” added Five. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if he got rid of your medication. He was hoping to push you into some kind of psychotic break.”

 

“I don’t - ” Vanya put her head in her hands. “He wanted _me_ to help him be a serial killer?”

 

“Yes,” said Five shortly. “Except then you proved that you were way better at it than he was.”

 

“This is ridiculous.”

 

“I must say, he’s been really supportive about it,” Five went on snidely. “Who do you think has been cleaning up after you? A lot of guys are resentful when their girlfriends outdo them in their field, but he’s been pretty devoted to ensuring you keep bringing home the bacon.”

 

“He did lock her in the crawlspace,” Ben pointed out.

 

“Oh, yeah,” said Five. “There’s that.”

 

“Wait,” said Vanya, “cleaning up - does that mean...his _own body_?”

 

“Oh yeah,” said Five. “It was pretty funny.”

 

“It wasn’t.” Ben threw him a withering look.

 

“Come on, it was hilarious. The look on his face.”

 

“But what am I going to do?” Vanya seemed on the verge of tears. “Maybe I should go to the police and turn myself in.”

 

“Do what you like,” said Five. “I just think it’s a pity, that’s all.”

 

“A _pity_? I killed people!”

 

“You’ve just synchronised with your extremely powerful alter ego. You could do incredible things with your skills. And you want to throw that all away in the name of justice?”

 

“Justice is pretty important, Five,” cautioned Ben.

 

“They won’t even throw her in prison. They’ll send her to some facility where she’ll spend the rest of her pitiful life being dissected and experimented on. It would be a crying shame.”

 

“Well, then what do you suggest?”

 

“Run away,” said Five blithely. “I’m going in a bit. Want to come?”

 

“She killed the last guy who invited her to go on a murder spree,” Ben pointed out. “What makes you think she’ll say yes?”

 

Five decided honesty was his best suit. “If you were with me,” he began, carefully, “I wouldn’t have to drain any more people to stay alive.”

 

Ben made a face. Vanya, however, said thoughtfully: “Why not?”

 

“Your blood,” said Five. “It’s not normal blood. It’s extraordinary.” He gestured to his duct-taped torso. “Do you know how many people I’d have to drain to make this happen? At least three, if not more. Instead it was just you, and you’re still alive.”

 

“What the hell?” said Ben. “Are you seriously suggesting that she should go on the run with you as some kind of...blood bag?”

 

“I think of it as an equitable transaction,” said Five. “She will give me sustenance. I don’t think I’ll even need very much each time, given how powerful her blood is. And if she loses control, then at least there’ll be someone around who’s not likely to die trying to stop her. We keep each other from killing more people. Everyone wins.”

 

“This is - not a terrible idea,” mused Vanya.

 

“What,” said Ben flatly.

 

“There we go!” said Five. “I’m a genius. When do we leave?”

 

“Wait.” Vanya sat up straight suddenly. “There’s someone in the house.”

 

They listened. Five could detect a whole lot of someones, in fact. They were filling up the hallway. He could smell gunmetal, cigarettes.

 

“Five,” began Ben, “in your condition I don’t think you should - ”

 

Five ignored him and apparated.

 

He reappeared in the gallery overlooking the front hall. Fighting back the urge to throw up from the inner roilings of his discombobulated body, he looked down and saw what seemed to be an entire squad of heavily armed gunmen, at least twenty, maybe more. They were sweeping the rooms. Five caught snatches of orders in Russian.

 

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” sighed Five, and apparated again.

 

*

 

“Just to be clear,” said Allison as she parked outside the Hargreeves mansion, “we’re only back here so that we can drop Luther home and Diego can get his stuff and go.”

 

“But - ” began Klaus.

 

“I'm grateful for what you did for Klaus," Allison went on. "But I’m not having this house become...the Batcave! Or whatever.”

 

“‘S all right,” said Diego. “That’s fair. Thanks for the lift.”

 

“You’re welcome,” said Allison tightly.

 

“I do need to use your bathroom, though,” added Diego. “Because - ” He gestured down at his hospital gown.

 

“Oh, yeah.” Allison sighed. “Go ahead.”

 

She was halfway across the front hall when she realised, with a sinking feeling, that she had left the door unlocked the whole day.

 

“Allison?” said Klaus behind her.

 

A figure that had been sitting on the stairs rose to meet her.

 

 _Oh shit,_ thought Allison. _Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit._

 

“Ms Jones.” Sergei stepped into the light, one arm extended expansively towards her. The other had a pistol tucked into his coat. It was aimed at her.

 

“It does seem,” said Sergei, grinning at them as other figures emerged from the shadows of the hall, “that there is something you can help me with after all.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: Should I give Diego an opportunity to change out of his hospital gown before things get epic?  
> Me: ...nah.


	9. with a song upon her mouth having death in her eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise for the delay in updating! I have been Travelling to Far Places. And I really wanted to give this chapter time to percolate properly. Here goes -

“On your knees,” said Sergei to Allison.

 

They had all been moved to the living room. She, Luther and Klaus were made to kneel on the carpet in front of the fireplace. Diego, his wrists zip-tied, had been separated from them. “We’ll take him back with us,” Sergei had said. “For him, we have special plans.”

 

The barrel of a gun was pressed into the base of her skull. Her breaths came short. Everything had narrowed down to that cold touch of metal. Would she feel it when it came? She tried to bring Claire’s face to mind, but her little girl kept slipping away. The gun filled her world.

 

“Let them go,” snarled Diego, “they have nothing to do with this.”

 

Sergei chuckled. “I was going to have them killed after you were removed.” He thumbed the safety back on the gun to Allison’s head. She let out a whimper. “But now I think you had better watch.”

 

“No!” She could hear Diego thrashing against his captors behind her. “No!”

 

Allison shut her eyes.

 

And then suddenly the room was filled with screaming.

 

*

 

“No,” said Grace again. Her face was fixed in a rictus of a smile, but tears were rolling down her alabaster cheeks. “No, no, no, no, no, no - ”

 

“You’ll be all right,” Ben was saying, holding her by the elbows, “just stay out of sight, go into the places they can’t go, go into the walls - ”

 

“They’re in the house,” Grace mumbled, “they’re in the house, it’s not right, it’s not right - ”

 

Vanya, standing behind her, saw that the wound in her head had begun to leak fresh blood.

 

“Grace,” said Ben, “we need to protect Vanya. They can hurt Vanya.”

 

“I mean, I could - ” Vanya began.

 

“No,” Ben said gravely, “if you turn into _her_ again, there’s no guarantee we can turn you back. You’ve got to hide. Grace, come on. Show Vanya where to hide.”

 

Grace’s head snapped up. “Larder,” she said. “This way.”

 

Vanya followed her into the cool of the stone larder. Grace gestured for her to sit on one of the crates and did so herself, spreading her skirts. “We’ll play a game,” she whispered. “Hide and seek. Only we’re hiding, and we must be quiet like mice.” She pressed her finger to her lips.

 

Slowly, Vanya mimicked her action.

 

“I’m going to check on Five,” said Ben, and vanished through the door.

 

Seconds ticked by. Vanya listened. She could hear, she realised, sharper than she ever had before.

 

There came the sound of boots on the stairs.

 

Vanya held her breath.

 

The boots moved into the kitchen. Circled the table. One of them was searching the kitchen area; she could hear him going in and out of the rooms. In front of the larder, he stopped. Tried the door.

 

The door held. Vanya let out her breath, then nearly shrieked when she heard the crash, the sound of a rifle stock being brought down on the lock. Grace, her hands clapped over her mouth, shuddered with every blow.

 

Five, six, seven, eight -

 

“I’m sorry,” Vanya said to nobody in particular, and as the door cracked and splintered, she let go.

 

*

 

“Don’t look at the table!” Klaus was yelling. “Don’t look at the table!”

 

There was plenty to look at. Robed figures were stumbling around the room, screaming. Luther watched, aghast, as one of them knelt down in front of him and actually put his head _into_ the fire, shoved it right over the grate and into the flames and held it there until the screams were burnt right out of his throat.

 

Klaus had already sprung into action, kicking out. Luther pulled himself together and flung himself at the man holding a gun to Allison. The gun went off. Plaster rained down on them. Luther grabbed the gun from him and bent the stock out of shape, then threw it at one of the men holding Diego captive. The other stuck his gun in Diego’s face and bellowed, “ _Make it stop! Make it stop_!”

 

“ _I don’t know how the fuck to_!” Diego roared back.

 

And then a teenage boy dropped out of seemingly nowhere and sank his teeth into the Russian’s throat.

 

*

 

Five reared back, sending arterial spray over Diego’s face. “You’re welcome,” he said savagely to Diego, before somebody shot him three times in the back. “Oh for fuck’s sake, I’m not in the mood for this shit - ” and then he was onto his next victim.

 

Diego decided to make the best of this madness and flung his zip-tied wrists around the nearest Russian’s neck, hoping to a) strangle him, b) break the zip-ties or at least c) use him as a human shield. Only c) proved remotely feasible, and the Russian was doing his damnedest to make even that difficult for him. His comrades were shooting at everything that moved - mostly the screaming figures in the robes, whatever the fuck that was. Diego wrestled his human shield over and behind a settee and hoped that Luther was getting Allison and Klaus out of the way.

 

“What on _earth_ are you wearing?” said Ben from behind him.

 

Diego nearly lost his grip on the Russian. “Well, excuse me if the invite to the bloodbath didn’t come with a dress code,” he retorted.

 

Ben surveyed the destruction, including the sight of his own dead body on the table. “And what kind of mess did you bring home now?”

 

“I’ll tidy up,” said Diego. “Eventually.”

 

“Oh, you’re lucky you’re cute,” said Ben. He stepped carefully over the settee. He cracked his shoulders, as if steeling himself. Then he shrugged off his jacket.

 

*

 

A glowing tentacle shot past Five and snatched up a gunman who was menacing Klaus in the corner, which meant Ben had joined the fray. “About time,” Five called to him as he let the man he had been draining drop. He couldn’t keep drinking, it was too much - plus the bullet holes in his back had closed with the bullets still in them, which was going to be annoying later. He grabbed his victim, apparated to the upper gallery, and dropped him for good measure on another guy trying to get the drop on Luther.

 

Five stopped to survey the chaos below from the gallery, which was when something whistled through the air and a stake buried itself in his shoulder.

 

“Damn, Hazel,” said a profoundly unwelcome voice. “You always aim too high to the left.”

 

Five sank to his knees. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating. “Hazel,” he said with forced cordiality. “Cha-Cha.”

 

“Caught you at a bad time?” inquired Hazel, stepping out of the shadows. Cha-Cha followed. She had a wooden crossbow aimed at Five.

 

“It’s not ideal,” said Five through gritted teeth. “We’re a bit busy with company, as you can see.”

 

“We won’t take up too much of your time,” rejoined Cha-Cha, and fired.

 

Five flung himself flat, the stake knocking agonisingly against the floor. Cha-Cha cursed. He listened for the rack of her reloading and apparated, but it hurt so much that he miscalculated and stumbled headlong into a bookshelf. He collapsed on the floor and began to crawl. He loathed everything about this. All these years, and here he was, stake in the shoulder, crawling from the likes of Hazel and Cha-Cha like a worm.

 

“Where do you think you’re going?” Cha-Cha sing-songed, and then there was a deafening blast.

 

Five turned, stunned, and looked through the smoking hole in Cha-Cha’s middle to see Grace framed, aiming a double-barrelled shotgun at a shocked Hazel.

 

“Get out of my house,” said Grace calmly, and pulled the trigger.

 

*

 

The loop flickered out and died as Ben strode through the room, unearthly and terrible, his body a pulsing hole in reality through which unspeakable things reached out and ripped people in two. It was the most magnificent and horrible thing Klaus had ever seen.

 

“Are you okay?” Ben said to him. He was standing over Klaus, but his voice seemed to fall from a great height, echoing as if down a long, dark well.

 

“I’m just peachy,” Klaus answered. His eyes kept drifting back to the tentacles. Ben saw him looking and his smile became glassy, dark.

 

“At least the house is pleased,” he said.

 

Klaus could feel it too. The house curled and purred like a cat, licking its lips as the bodies fell.

 

And then there was something else.

 

“It’s waiting,” he said out loud. “For what?”

 

Ben spun, alarmed, but then they all heard it: the high, sweet strains of a violin, and then a woman in white stepped out above.

 

*

 

It was the White Violin who stood in the gallery and raised her bow. One of the Russians, panicked, raised his semi-automatic rifle and fired a volley at her. The White Violin played a single, reverberating note and swept the bullets out of the way as if they were a curtain of beads, whereupon they pattered to the living room carpet in a quiet rain.

 

Then the White Violin began to play, fast.

 

The violin bit out arpeggios as the fingers of the man who had shot at her fell off. It took him a while more to start screaming, by which time she had moved down his arms to his elbows, and then up his shoulders. His shinbones snapped as the violin sang. He folded into a heap of parts on the carpet, though he continued to wheeze and make horrible noises until a chord progression cut his throat.

 

Because they were slow on the uptake, the rest of the Russians started firing on her too.

 

The White Violin played a rolling, rilling passacaglia. Every bullet exploded in its path, filling the air above the living room with sparks. And then she began to shred the people that had fired them, as easily as if they were paper. She folded the shreds of them into shapes beyond recognition. Her music knotted tendons and splintered spines, made origami out of limbs, scattered teeth in the air like confetti.

 

The house yawned and stretched. Something was growing at the hearth; at first, it seemed to be a darkening stain from the blood seeping into the carpet, but then there was no more carpet. The floor was falling away, and there was a chasm in the living room, a great maw of earth and flame, the edges of which crumbled and gaped further and further as the White Violin played.

 

“Vanya,” Five tried to say across the gap between the galleries. Something wasn’t right inside him. Things were not going where they should. “Vanya, stop it.”

 

The White Violin looked up and locked gazes with him. Her eyes were white as pearls with pinpricks of darkness. In a rich, melodious voice, she spoke. “Vanya isn’t in right now.”

 

A glowing tentacle smashed through the banister, curled around her waist and plucked her off the balcony.

 

*

 

The White Violin sliced through the tentacle. Ben felt it as if she had cut through one of his arms, even as he sent another tentacle grabbing for the violin. She deflected that one too and remained where she was in mid-air, levitating. Nothing for it. Ben reached into the void within him and let Them through.

 

They came, howling and gibbering, and she cut Them to pieces. Made ribbons of Their almighty flesh. The chasm had stopped growing, although the house was shuddering as if it was being tossed in a hurricane. Ben began to feel Them flagging, retreating, cowering from the tireless onslaught of the music. _You cowards!_ he told Them, and urged Them back out. Klaus was behind him, a hand at the small of his back, giving him all the power he could muster. Ben took it and forced Them tumbling into this world and into the path of carnage even as it felt like he was being turned inside out and his bared innards set on fire.

 

“ _We know you’re in there, Vanya_ ,” he roared in the voice of many tongues. “ _Come back to us_.”

 

And then he felt the power drain from him like a blown circuit, as Klaus fell away from him with a choked-off cry.

 

*

 

“Easy now,” Leonard was saying. “Easy now.”

 

Klaus gasped and clawed at the wire around his throat. The room blackened around him like charring paper. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Ben keening in agony. He reached out desperately, feeling for something, anything, felt his hand close around the flesh of Leonard’s face. His thumb pushed, with a pop, into the empty socket. Leonard laughed. “Wrong one,” he said, and squeezed harder.

 

*

 

Diego wasn’t feeling particularly useful at this moment. There was the hellmouth growing in the living room and the ectoplasmic shitshow going on above their heads, which he would have made absolutely no difference in. All the Russians were dead. Even Grace seemed to have laid her hands on a shotgun. His kingdom for a knife.

 

As if from long ago, he heard Klaus’s voice. _Whatever was at hand - poker, letter opener, paperweight. They killed themselves in that room._

 

Diego saw the antique desk in the corner and lunged for it.

 

There was still a letter opener in the desk, even if it was a bit too intricately carved for his taste. But a knife was a knife. Diego hefted it just as he heard Ben scream and turned to see Leonard garrot Klaus.

 

“Oh, fuck that,” said Diego, and threw the letter opener into Leonard’s back.

 

Leonard hissed, but didn’t let go of Klaus. Diego took a running jump, vaulted the chasm in the floor - felt the flames licking his heels - rolled to a stop behind them and pulled the knife out of Leonard’s back. He dragged Leonard’s head back by the hair. He cut his throat.

 

*

 

Allison was huddled in a corner behind the piano, watching the house fall apart.

 

Luther was trying to get to her by edging around the chasm, but debris kept rocketing about the place and smashing into the walls. “Stay put!” she screamed at him, though it hardly carried over the shriek of the diabolical violin.

 

Luther was staring at something over her shoulder. Allison turned to look and nearly jumped out of her skin.

 

There was an old man standing behind her. He had a perfectly pressed suit from another era, a forbidding mustache and a monocle in his eye. He was speaking to her, but she could not hear a word.

 

“What?” Allison shouted at him, but the whirlwind that was now happening in the living room snatched the word out of her mouth.

 

The old man threw her a look of immense frustration and bent down over a body she recognised as Sergei. He sank a gloved finger into the gaping hole in Sergei’s neck, coating it in dark blood. He began to write on the wall.

 

I HEARD A RUMOUR

 

Then he pointed his finger, still dripping blood, at Allison.

 

“I heard a rumour,” said Allison.

 

For a second, the world seemed to hold its breath. Something strange yet familiar shivered in the air. Then it collected itself and barrelled on without her in sound and fury.

 

The old man gestured at her furiously to do it again.

 

“I heard a rumour,” said Allison again, but it was no use; nobody could hear her. Allison looked down at the gun lying in Sergei’s hand. She bent to pick it up.

 

Over the chasm, she met Luther’s eyes. He looked horrified. _No,_ he mouthed frantically.

 

Allison braced herself, aimed at the White Violin and fired.

 

The shot went wide, of course. Allison had never had very good aim. But for a second, the White Violin paused to turn her terrible gaze upon Allison, who opened her mouth and screamed: “ _I heard a rumour you stopped doing this_.”

 

Silence.

 

Everyone stopped what they were doing. Ben, looking haggard, sagged to the floor. Even the chasm ceased, for a breath, to roil.

 

The White Violin looked incandescent. She raised her bow once more.

 

“ _I heard a rumour you were no longer in control,”_ Allison told her in a rush. She remembered the name she had heard Ben and Five call out. “ _I heard a rumour Vanya came back_.”

 

The White Violin dropped like a stone. She would have fallen straight into the chasm, but something snatched her out of mid-air; a second later, Five tumbled onto the floor with her at the other end of the room, both of them unconscious.

 

Allison looked hesitantly at the wreckage around her. She felt, suddenly, so very tired.

 

“I heard a rumour,” she said in a small voice, “that everything is going to be okay.”

 

*

 

The police arrived then, as they always did in Diego’s experience: too late to be of any real use but just in time to make some inconvenient arrests. They were hampered in this by the fact that the house was crumbling - not in an apocalyptic hellmouth sort of way, as it had previously done, but simply having its foundations give in to the laws of physics. It was dying naturally this time.

 

“Get them to your flat,” Allison was telling Luther, who was carrying both the unconscious Five and Vanya, “hide them there until it all blows over.”

 

“What about you?”

 

“I’ll take care of this,” said Allison with a forced smile. “But hurry!” She turned and ran towards the front door, through which they could see sirens and the flash of cameras, even as the ceiling began to cave in.

 

The upper galleries began to buckle and slide. Diego saw Grace stumble.

 

“Grace!” he shouted. “Jump!” He didn’t know if he could catch her, but he could damn well try.

 

“It’s all right,” Grace called to him. “It’s time.”

 

She was smiling again, at peace. She touched two fingers to her lips and extended them towards him. Then, calmly, she began to walk away from him, even as the gallery tilted like a seesaw and the bottom half of it struck the floor. She kept walking up the steadily steepening incline and when the whole thing came crashing down, she was nowhere to be seen.

 

“Ben!” Klaus was calling desperately, digging through the rubble. “Ben!” But Ben wasn’t there.

 

“We gotta go,” Luther told them urgently. “Is there a back way?”

 

“Yeah,” said Diego. He grabbed Klaus. “Come on.”

 

Klaus was crying openly, his fists clenched and bleeding. “But what about Ben?”

 

“He’s dead.” Diego felt something seize in his throat as he said it, but he choked it out anyway for Klaus’s sake. “He’s dead. We gotta go.”

 

“No,” Klaus shot back, “No! No!” He fought Diego all the way through the garden and out the back door as the house fell to pieces around them, not a ghost to be seen.

 

*

 

Allison stumbled across the threshold just as the front hall fell away behind her and raised a hand to shield herself from the glare of the cameras.

 

Reporters were jostling each other to get to her, shoving against the ring of policemen trying to keep them away, shouting their questions. “What happened here! Who did this! What’s your name!”

 

Allison, out of habit, straightened her collar and put her best smile on her face, the smile that sold stories, sold homes, sold new beginnings. “My name is Allison Jones,” she began. “I’m a realtor.”

 

Some officers were edging towards her. “Ma’am, look at me, don’t look at the press, look at me - ”

 

“I heard a rumour you let me say my piece,” Allison shot at them, and they stopped, confused.

 

“This is the Hargreeves mansion,” she went on, smiling, always smiling, to the cameras. “It’s the most desirable piece of real estate in town. It’s a slice of 19th-century heritage. So when I heard a rumour that everybody wanted it, just about everybody - I knew I had to be the one to sell it.”

  



	10. I watch the roses of the day grow deep

_One week later_

 

Allison met Luther at the airport.

 

“It’s so weird,” he said when she handed him takeaway coffee at Arrivals. “To go through all that crazy stuff and then have to fly a bunch of folks to Boracay like nothing happened. I mean, they don’t even know. _Nobody_ knows.”

 

“Except us,” said Allison, and sipped her latte.

 

“Yeah,” said Luther. “Except us.”

 

“So I heard you went viral while I was away,” he added, as they headed for the carpark.

 

“Yeah.” Allison still hadn’t wrapped her head around that. “It’s been...wild.”

 

“Wild” was a mild way to sum up pitching a house that had just collapsed behind her on live TV and then starting a bidding war between two heritage institutions, one carnival proprietor who wanted to build a “house of horrors” on the site and an enigmatic branch of the government. She’d let it go to the government in the end. They had put in a respectable bid and she thought they might be the least fazed about the number of bodies in the rubble and how, no matter how hard anyone tried, nobody seemed able to talk about how they had got there.

 

“Well,” said Luther, “you’ll definitely be a legend in the real estate world after this. Nothing you can’t sell.”

 

“Actually,” began Allison. “I got a phone call.”

 

It turned out that one of the side effects of being in a viral video was that all sorts of people you’d never expect to draw the attention of got interested in you.

 

“So, uh, I have an agent now,” said Allison. “And she’s lining up all these auditions for me. Mostly TV, but she says she thinks I can make it in Hollywood.”

 

“Wow.”

 

“I know! It’s crazy! I haven’t acted since college. But she said apparently that’s not so important. What matters is that I have this _look_ , or something. Anyway, I think I’ve maybe hit a ceiling in real estate, so I thought I’d give this a shot.”

 

“Are you - ” Luther glanced at her uncertainly. “Are you going to do the - you know. At your audition?”

 

Allison thought about it. It would be so easy. The world unrolling itself for her like a red carpet.

 

She thought about Claire. Thought about her sweet, guileless face, her clear laugh. Thought about how she’d managed to make something so perfect without meaning to, without speaking it into being. Just like that.

 

Some things you had to fight for.

 

“Nah,” she said, keeping her voice light. “Think I’ll save it for a rainy day.”

 

*

 

One day after the not-pocalypse, Diego moved in with Klaus.

 

He hadn’t had many options, he told himself. The gym was still off-limits, because the remnants of the mafia might still be watching it. He’d have to look into getting new gear soon, because right now he was stuck wearing clothes he’d borrowed from Luther and they were horribly big.

 

“I’m taking the couch,” he told Klaus, as a matter of consideration.

 

“Sucks to be you,” retorted Klaus, “I don’t have a couch.”

 

Two days later, Klaus turned in his fractious sleep and buried his face in Diego’s neck. His hand splayed on Diego’s ribs. Diego, who slept very little, let him.

 

Three days later, Diego took out all the knives in the apartment - which were fewer than he fancied - laid them out on the table and sharpened them.

 

“Christ on a cracker,” said Klaus, back from a coffee-and-cigarettes run to the corner shop. “I have that many knives?”

 

“I need to go shopping again,” said Diego.

 

“With whose money?”

 

“Usually I just rob some drug lords.”

 

“Great,” said Klaus. “The ATM of crime.”

 

Four days later, they were watching the news. Or Klaus was watching the news while painting his toenails and Diego was doing push-ups in the scant floor space (he had already broken Klaus’s curtain rail). “Diego,” said Klaus, and it was footage of the site where the Hargreeves mansion had once stood, which Allison had miraculously sold to the government. They had erected a fence around it, beyond which excavators could be seen ponderously churning the ground.

 

“Do you think he’s in there?” said Klaus.

 

“They all went when the house went,” Diego said. “You felt it.”

 

“Not him,” said Klaus. “I didn’t feel him at all.”

 

Five days later, Klaus convinced Diego to steal a rock.

 

“We have to try, Diego, come on!”

 

"Fine," said Diego. "What kind of rock?"

 

Six days later, Diego put the rock, which he had acquired after some frantic fence-climbing and a bit of a foot race with site security, on the kitchen table. It was about the size of a brick and shaped a bit like an eggplant.

 

“Knife,” said Klaus, hand outstretched.

 

Diego raised an eyebrow, but handed him one of his new blades.

 

Klaus drew the tip of the blade down both of his palms, a thin red line across Hello and another across Goodbye. He laid them both on the rock and shut his eyes.

 

Nothing happened.

 

“Maybe we need a bigger rock,” said Diego.

 

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Klaus.

 

“Maybe he really was done with it,” tried Diego. “Like Grace. Maybe he wanted out too.”

 

“Even so,” said Klaus hotly, “I’d want to hear it from him.”

 

Diego stared at him, thinking. Then he reached out and took the knife. He scored his own palms and laid them over Klaus’s.

 

Again, nothing happened.

 

“Oh,” said Klaus, looking down at their hands, bleeding over one another and onto the rock and onto the table. “At least we tried.”

 

Seven days later, Diego woke up early for a run and so he could look at new safehouses. He was making himself bad instant coffee in the kitchenette when he felt somebody else in the room with him.

 

Diego palmed a knife from the drying rack and spun to throw it.

 

“Jesus,” said Ben. “Again with the not checking?”

 

Diego gaped at him. Ben was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table, cradling the rock in his hands, dried bloodstains and all.

 

“I d- didn’t th-think - ” Fuck, Diego hadn’t stuttered in years.

 

“That I’d want to come back?” Ben tossed the rock up and down. “I did have to spend some time thinking about it. But then I thought, I’m not done. I’m not done with this world at all. So. Guess I’m haunting you guys now.” He put the rock down, and looked up uncertainly. “If you’ll have me, that is.”

 

“Ben?” Klaus was coming awake, still bleary with sleep. “Ben!” And then he was flinging his arms around Ben. Diego watched them, a lump in his throat, and then Klaus, face still buried in Ben’s collarbone, was extending a hand behind him, not even looking, just reaching out. Ben was tracing the scars on Klaus’s palm with something like wonder. When Diego came within reach, he traced his too.

 

“Yeah,” Diego managed after some time. “I think we’ll keep you.”

  


*

 

Vanya liked the park at this hour. It wasn’t too hot and people moved slower, smiled more, and didn’t think so much about dropping coins into the violin case at her feet.

 

Classical music didn’t do so well at the park, so she played popular tunes instead. She had just gone through the Game Of Thrones theme, which always drew a crowd.

 

“Pandering to the masses,” was Five’s take on it. He had occupied the bench next to her, where he was now reading Yuval Noah Harari by streetlamp and arguing out loud with the text every dozen pages. He had got it out of the library. For a person on the run, Five went to the library way too often. His card said his name was Nicholas M. Cavelli and that he had been born in 2002.

 

“You try earning some income for a change,” she retorted.

 

She’d left the orchestra, left her apartment, left her old life behind. Unlikely that they’d tie her to the bodies being unearthed in the mansion, said Five, but best to be careful all the same. As far as anyone except the seven of them knew, Vanya had vanished, just another of the many victims swallowed by the house. She was surprised at how easy it was to simply put everything down and walk away.

 

She could hear everything in the park. The leaves in the wind, the splash of water off the backs of distant ducks, the crunch of dry grass under the feet of children. The world was like a set of strings just waiting to be plucked. But not now.

 

“About that,” said Five. “Diego’s got a proposition.”

 

“Oh, no.”

 

“He says he wants to ‘level up’,” Five went on, using quotation marks with distaste. “In the vigilante game. He wants us to join him.”

 

“To...fight crime?”

 

“He’s asked Luther and Allison. Allison’s not keen, on account of her kid and her role in the new Spike Lee film, but I think Luther can be persuaded.”

 

“That is the total opposite of low-profile,” pointed out Vanya. “That is so not what two people on the run should do.”

 

Hazel and Cha-Cha’s bodies had not been found in the rubble. Shotgun blasts would only temporarily incapacitate those two, Five pointed out. The Temps Aeternalis had not sent anyone new after him yet, but it was only a matter of time.

 

“So he’ll be in charge, will he?” Vanya went on. “Diego.”

 

“I’m sure he _thinks_ he will be.”

 

“We would make terrible superheroes.”

 

“Oh, we’re terrible all right,” said Five airily. In the same tone, he added: “He’s watching us. Don’t look now.”

 

“I’m not an idiot,” said Vanya. She began to play the solo from The Godfather. As she did, she let her eyes drift over to the man in the parka standing in the copse of trees across from their bench. Her gaze rested on him for a second, then moved on.

 

“Whenever you’re ready,” said Five, flicking disparagingly through a section on the scientific revolution.

 

Half an hour later, they were walking back through the park in the gathering dusk. Neither of them said anything. There was only the crunch of their shoes on the leaves. Nobody else walked in this part of the park any more, not since the women had started disappearing, the ones who went running or just wanted to take a shortcut this time of night.

 

Five had slowed to match his pace to Vanya’s, so that their footsteps sounded in sync. When the third set of footsteps came into hearing, they paused. She glanced at Five, and then they turned around at the same time.

 

It was the man in the parka from earlier. Now he was wearing a ski mask. In his hand was a gun, pointed at Five.

 

“You, kid,” he said, slightly muffled through the mask, to Five. “Get down on the ground, hands behind your back.” With his spare hand, he tossed a length of rope at Vanya’s feet. “You, tie him up. Or I’ll kill him. ”

 

Five looked appraisingly at the man, and then he grinned, his too-wide grin, the one that showed all his teeth.

 

“What the fuck are you looking at?” exploded the man. “Get down, now, don’t fucking test me.”

 

Vanya splayed her palm behind her back, felt the numbing sensation go up her arm, felt it grow and harden and curve. The strings of the world were taut and ready.

 

Five said: “How about a little night music?”

 

*

 

“I’ve never been to a housewarming before for a house I sold,” Allison admitted when Ben let her in.

 

“First time for everything,” said Ben, as she and Luther edged through the door, handing him two bottles of wine as they went. Ben felt the weight of them in his hands. Klaus was somewhere in the kitchen, but every day the radius of his power stretched a little bit further, at least where Ben was concerned.

 

“And last.” Allison smiled. “I’ve quit real estate for good. This’ll be the last house I ever sell.”

 

The house in question was one of those that had seemed impossible to flip. It was in a terrible neighbourhood, not remotely near the subway and, at the time Allison’s former colleague had palmed it off on her, a drug den with one very insistent poltergeist who had OD’ed in it last year. “Hurray,” Klaus had said when Allison had told them. “It’s like a Venn diagram of our specialties.”

 

Drug dealers evicted, poltergeist ushered on to the afterlife and renovations accomplished - being able to levitate objects by playing the violin at them had proved highly useful when it came to moving furniture - the house had actually proved quite pleasant. Granted, they didn’t so much have wallpaper in the living room as a floor-to-ceiling web of crime scene photos, mug shots and post-its linked by pins and colourful string, with which Diego was mapping gangland activity. Five would annotate every available surface with chalk the moment he had any sort of epiphany. Klaus left glitter everywhere, even in the fridge. Vanya played her violin at ungodly hours. It was tricky trying to tell your housemate that the shower drain would clog if she didn’t clear her hair out of it when said housemate could kill you with a thought. But they were working things out.

 

In the living room, Allison was regarding the crime wall with a bemused expression. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” she said unconvincingly as Diego strolled in, twirling a butterfly knife.

 

“Thanks.” Diego clapped Luther on the shoulder. “We still on for next Sunday?”

 

“Um,” said Luther with a significant glance in Allison's direction.

 

“Next Sunday?” Allison looked up sharply. “What’s on next Sunday?”

 

“Nothing,” said Diego casually. “Just, uh, we’re going bowling.”

 

“Let me guess.” Allison pointed at a photo on the crime wall. “This wouldn’t happen to be at the bowling alley on Ninth where the illegal money laundering takes place, would it?”

 

“Damn,” said Diego admiringly. “You’re fast.”

 

“That’s what happens when you put your whole gameplan up on a wall in such bald detail that a ten-year-old could grasp it,” said Five from an armchair in the corner that had been empty a second before. Everyone jumped. Five calmly sipped from a chipped teacup of whisky.

 

Diego threw the knife at him. Five apparated with a rattle of teacup and reappeared on the staircase.

 

“The furniture, guys,” said Ben, resigned.

 

“Are you even coming on Sunday?” Diego called to Five.

 

“We already have plans,” said Five dismissively. “I believe we have a lead on the Dockyard Strangler. But we’ll drop by if we wrap up early.”

 

Klaus danced out of the kitchen in the neon-pink faux-fur vest he had recently acquired at a theatre clearance sale and snagged the wine from Ben, pecking him on the cheek as he went. “Chateauneuf du Pape!” he sang to Allison. “Hollywood is treating you well, I see.”

 

“I’m shooting this blockbuster apocalypse movie now.” Allison took Five’s place in the armchair. “An eco-thriller. Climate change, but really speedy.”

 

“How’d you even have time to come over?” Klaus wanted to know.

 

“Oh. My character dies early on.” Allison shrugged. “Don’t even get to stop the end of the world.”

 

“Shows what they know.” Vanya was leaning in the doorway, gazing at Allison.

 

Everyone froze, just for an infinitesimal moment. They all tried not to bring up the apocalypse business around Vanya as far as possible, which had got rather difficult since she had moved in with them.

 

Vanya gave them all a small smile. “Anyway. Nothing like the real thing.” She slipped into the room and went to perch on the window seat.

 

“Well,” said Diego, as everyone let out the breath they had been holding, “if you ever tire of fake-saving the world on greenscreen, you’re welcome to come bowling. We could always use someone who’ll...put in a good word for us.”

 

Five rolled his eyes so hard it was practically audible.

 

“I thought this was a housewarming, not a recruitment exercise,” said Allison, accepting a glass of wine from Klaus.

 

“No pressure.” Diego toasted her with a wink.

 

Allison sighed. “I’ll...think about it.”

 

Diego beamed. Luther tried to work out which chairs he could sit on without breaking them and finally settled on the floor, knees drawn up, at Allison’s feet. Five was now at the window with Vanya, chalking a body outline on the nearest wall and discussing it in low tones. On the sofa, Klaus curled into Ben’s side like a large, fluffy, neon-pink cat. Ben scritched the back of his neck absent-mindedly.

 

The afterlife was looking up.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba for creating this madcap universe, to e e cummings for all his inadvertently creepy verse that I have appropriated for chapter headings, and to all you lovely readers for following me to the end of this ridiculous horrorshow. May Season 2 be upon us before we know it.


End file.
